Scottish Text Society publications > Old series > New Testament in Scots > Volume 1, 1901

INTRODUCTION.
Xlll
this responsibility, and meanwhile ‘ It pleased the Lord,
as a great mercy to James Nisbit, to incline his nepheu
to a liking to what is good and serious. ... A feu
dayes before his death he sent to my Lord, and told
nou he was a dying, and he had gote his papers and
rights in some order, and could nou trust his nepheu
. . . with them and the family Wickliffe’s Testament.’
Mr Quaritch (Catalogue of Manuscripts, Dec. 1893)
gives the further information that James’s widow left
the volume with Sir Alexander Boswell in trust for the
young man, who was not to receive it unless he should
prove himself worthy of it. It was, however, presently
handed over to him, and he sold it to Gavin Hamilton,
in whose bookshop Boswell discovered it in 1745. He
at once recovered the volume by purchase, and it re¬
mained at Auchinleck until the early part of 1893.
It will be remarked that the family tradition no¬
where describes Nisbet’s ‘new book’ as in any way
distinctively Scottish. Dr M‘Crie (in his ‘ Life of
Melville,’ vol. ii. p. 404), referring to the ‘ True Rela¬
tion,’ seemed to have no suspicion that the MS. was
anything more than an ordinary copy of Wycliffe’s
version. But it is manifestly the work of a Scottish
scribe, who, taking Purvey’s revision of Wycliffe as a
basis, altered the grammar and vocabulary wherever
necessary to make his transcript intelligible or easily
readable to his own countrymen, and that scribe is
clearly no other than Murdoch Nisbet himself. Unfor¬
tunately very little is known of the Lollard movement
in Scotland. In 1494 a raid was made upon the
Lollards of Kyle, in the neighbourhood of Nisbet’s own
home, when thirty persons, among whom were George