For many years no example of the original edition of the Decem Rationes was known to exist:  none of our great public libraries in London or at the Universities possesses a copy.  But it was the singular good fortune of the late Marquess of Bute to pick up two copies of this extremely rare volume, and he munificently presented one of them to Stonyhurst College.  Canon Gunning of Winchester is the happy owner of a third copy.  By the courtesy of the Rector of Stonyhurst, I am able to offer a minute description of the precious little book.

The volume is, considering the printing of that time, distinctly well got up.  There is nothing at first sight to suggest that its publication had been a matter of so much difficulty and danger; but when one scrutinizes every page with care, one finds that it bears about it some traces of the unusual circumstances under which it was produced.

If we look first for the water-mark in the paper we shall find that it is the pot—­the ordinary English sign; a proof, if one were needed, that the book was really printed in this country.  The sheets run from A to K (with prefixed [double-dagger]), in fours, 16mo; the folios are 44, of which 39 are numbered (but by accident the pagination is omitted from 1 to 4 and 40 is blank as well as the fly-leaves).

Let us think of what this means.  Eleven signatures for 44 folios, 16mo, means that only eight pages 16mo went into each printing frame, or, in other words, that the frame was so small that it would have been covered by half a folio sheet, 9 by 13 inches.  They probably printed off each little sheet by itself, for if they had had a larger frame so as to print an entire folio sheet—­then we should have found in the finished book that the water-mark would recur once in each sixteen pages.  In point of fact, however, it only recurs irregularly in the first, fifth, and tenth gathering.  This could not have occurred unless the sheets used were of half folio size.

A Greek fount was evidently wanting.  Campion was fond, after the fashion of scholars of that day, of throwing into his Latin letters a word or two of Greek, which in his autograph are written, as Mr. Simpson has remarked, with the facility of one familiar with the language.  Here on fol. 24 a we find adynata, where [Greek:  adunata] would have been in Campion’s epistolary manner.  Again, on fol. 4 b he quotes, “Hic calix novum testamentum in sanguine meo, qui (calix) pro vobis fundetur,” and in the margin Poterion Ekchynomenon, in Italics, where Greek script, if obtainable, would obviously have been preferred.  A further indication of the difficulties under which type had been procured is seen in the use of a query sign of a black-letter fount (i.e. [different question mark]) instead of the Roman fount (i.e.,?).  This will be the more readily comprehended when we remember that Father Persons’ books, which Brinkley had printed before, were in English, and that English prose was then still generally printed in Gothic character[9].