Note 9 — PREFACE.

The Biographia Britannica is amusingly severe in its strictures on the renowned Mrs. Barnes, and her incongruous occupations in the field and cloister. “There appears such a motley masquerade—Biograph. Brit. note, Caxton, p. 367.such an indistinctness of petticoat and breeches,—such a problem and concorporation of sexes, according to the image that arises out of the several representations of this religious sportswoman or virago, that one can scarcely consider it, without thinking Sir Tristram, the old monkish forester, and Juliana, the matron of the nuns, had united to confirm John Cleveland’s ‘Canonical Hermaphrodite.’”