"I would have hereto put mi name, good reader, but I know wel
that thou regardest not who writteth, but what is writen; thou
estemest the worde of the verite, and not of the authour. And
as for M. More, whom the verite most offendeth, and doth but
mocke it out when he can not sole it, _he knoweth my name wel
inough_" (sub fin).

But here rises a grave difficulty, which I have taken the liberty of
propounding to the readers of "Notes and Queries." Notwithstanding the
above statements, both of the writer and of Sir Thomas More, as to the
_anonymous_ character of the treatise we are considering, the "Epistle
to the Reader" is in my copy subscribed "Robert Crowley," naturally
inducing the belief that the whole emanated from him.

Perhaps this difficulty may be resolved on the supposition that, while
the body of the Tract was first published without the "Epistle to
the Reader," and More's reply directed against it under this form, it
might soon afterwards have reached a second edition, to which the name
of the author was appended. It is certain that More's copy consisted
of 32 leaves only (p. 1039, G.), which corresponds with that now
before me, excluding the "Epistle to the Reader." Still, it is
difficult to conceive that the paragraph in which the author speaks
of himself as anonymous should have remained uncancelled in a
second edition after he had drawn off what More calls "his visour
of dissimulacion." There is, indeed, another supposition which would
account for the discrepancy in question, viz. that the epistle and a
fresh title-page were prefixed to some copies of the original edition;
but the pagination of the Tract seems to preclude this conjecture,
for B.i. stands upon the third leaf from what must have been the
commencement if we subtract the "Epistle to the Reader."