[Footnote 15: In the first edition of Holinshed (1577) this chapter is the 5th in Book III. of Harrison’s _Description_.]
[Footnote 20: The remainder of this paragraph is not in ed. 1577.]
[Footnote 23: The 1577 ed. inserts _horrible_.]
[Footnote 24: The 1577 ed. reads _fifty_.]
[Footnote 25: §–§ The 1577 ed. reads 22, which is evidently an error.]
[Footnote 26: *–* For these words the 1577 ed. reads _gather_.]
[Footnote 27: The above list is taken from the titles of the chapters in Harman’s _Caueat_.]
[Footnote 29: ††–†† These words are substituted for _which they disfigure to begg withal_ in the 1577 ed.]
[Footnote 30: The 1577 ed. inserts _bearwards_.]
[Footnote 32: ‡‡–‡‡ These three sentences are not in 1577 ed.]
Among the users of Harman’s book, the chief and coolest was the author of _The groundworke of Conny-catching_, 1592, who wrote a few introductory pages, and then quietly reprinted almost all Harman’s book with an ‘I leaue you now vnto those which by Maister Harman are discouered’ (p. 103, below). By this time Harman was no doubt dead.—Who will search for his Will in the Wills Office?—Though Samuel Rowlands was alive, he did not show up this early appropriator of Harman’s work as he did a later one. As a kind of Supplement to the _Caueat_, I have added, as the 4th tract in the present volume, such parts of the _Groundworke of Conny-catching_ as are not reprinted from Harman. The _Groundworke_ has been attributed to Robert Greene, but on no evidence (I believe) except Greene’s having written a book in three Parts on Conny-catching, 1591–2, and ‘A Disputation betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher, whether a Theafe or a Whore is most hvrtfull in Cousonage to the Common-wealth,’ 1592.[33] Hearne’s copy of the _Groundworke_ is bound up in the 2nd vol. of Greene’s Works, among George III.’s books in the British Museum, as if it really was Greene’s.
Another pilferer from Harman was Thomas Dekker, in his _Belman of London_, 1608, of which three editions were published in the same year (_Hazlitt_). But Samuel Rowlands found him out and showed him up. From the fifth edition of the Belman, the earliest that our copier, Mr W. M. Wood, could find in the British Museum, he has drawn up the following account of the book: