UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES SCHOOL OF LIBRARY SERVICE Books in Manuscript Falconer Madan BOOK OF KELLS 7'1'H CFNT., IRISH Books in Manuscript A Short Introduction to their Study and Use. With a Chapter on Records By Falconer Madan, M.A Fellow of Brasenose College Lecturer in Mediaeval Palaeography in the University of Oxford London Kegan Paul, Trench, Trtibner & Co., MDCCCXCIII U&L Preface THIS work is intended to be a plain account of the study and use of manuscripts, such as will interest both the amateur who may possess manu- script treasures, but may lack the time or oppor- tunity to go deeply into the subject, and the student who may wish to have a clear view of the character and methods of the study, before entering on the details of palaeography and textual criticism. There is, therefore, little room for original matter, or for references to substantiate the statements made ; but the writer has attempted to be precise as well as plain, and to avoid exaggeration and prolixity. If the book leads collectors of manuscripts, or students either of the classics or of historical records, to take a keener and more intelligent interest in their work, his object will be attained. The writer's best thanks are due to the editor of the series, Mr. A. W. Pollard, of the British Museum, for both general and specific help ; to the Rev. O. W. Minns for permission to make vi Preface use of a forthcoming account of the library at Titchfield Monastery, and to the publishers of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Mr. H. R. Tedder (who has kindly corrected the details) for allowing him to construct Appendix A from their copyright material. The majority of the illustrations have been taken from Oxford manuscripts, in order to secure the exceptional advantages afforded by the photo- graphic department now attached to the Clarendon Press. F. MA I) AN. April 1893. Contents CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY, i CHAPTER II MATERIALS FOR WRITING, AND FORMS OF BOOKS, . . 5 CHAPTER III THE HISTORY OF WRITING, iS CHAPTER IV SCRIBES AND THEIR WAYS, 32 ILLUMINATIONS .47 CHAPTER VI THE BLUNDERS OF SCRIBES AND THEIR CORRECTION. . 59 CHAPTER VII FAMOUS LIBRARIES, 75 CHAPTER VIII FAMOUS MANUSCRIPTS, . . 92 viii Contents CHAPTER IX LITERARY FORGERIES, 112 CHAPTER X TREATMENT AND CATALOGUING OF MANUSCRIPTS, . . 137 CHAPTER XI PUBLIC AND PRIVATE RECORDS, 150 APPENDIX A, 163 APPENDIX B, 166 APPENDIX C, 175 INDEX, 183 Illustrations PLATE i. BOOK OF KELLS, Frontispiece n. ST. MARK, opposite page i in. SACRAMENTARY, ,, 29 iv. SCRIPTORIUM, ,, 37 v. APOCALYPSE, ,, 56 vi. ST. MICHAEL, .,58 vn. SEND INSCRIPTION, ,,92 viii. CAEDMON, 106 NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PLATE I. (BOOK OF KELLS). Trinity College, Dublin, MS. (Book of Kells), fol. 290 (written in the second half of the seventh century in Ireland). This is a reproduction, by collotype, of Plate IX. in J. O. Westwood's Facsimiles of Miniatures of Anglo-Saxon and Irish Manuscripts, London, 1868, reduced about one-half in linear size. It represents the symbols of the four Evangelists, set in a framework of intricate geometrical design. The inter- laced bands and spirals are deserving of minute examination, while the comparative rudeness of the drawings of living figures show clearly the limitations of excellence in the Irish School (see page 53). The principal colours are yellow, red, pink, and green. Some lacertine figures can be distinguished in two of the limbs of the large diagonal cross. PLATE II. (ST. MARK). Brit. Mus. MS., Add. 18,850, fol. 24 (the Bedford Hours). A collotype reproduction, reduced about one-half in linear size. The Bedford Hours (Horae B. Mariae Virginis) generally known as the Bedford Missal, one of the most splendid ex- amples of fifteenth-century illumination, is a MS. written and painted for John, Duke of Bedford, son of Henry iv., and Anne, his wife, daughter of the Uuke of Burgundy, after their mar- riage in 1423, and before the presentation of the volume to Henry vi. in 1430. The style is French, probably Burgundian ; and the illuminations are among the finest known. That in the plate represents St. Mark, ' comment Saint Marc escript 1'Euuangile et a figure du lion." The lion, one wing of which is red and the other white, is depicted as holding the inkpot, and the Saint's left hand holds a blunt instrument for steadying the parchment, and preventing the contact of hand and sheet : xii Notes on I Illustrations by the side is a hanging lamp. There is appreciation of per- spective in the drawing of the architectural background. The border represents scenes in the life of St. Mark. The first two lines run : In illo tempore accum \ bentibus undecim disci. The devolution of this volume has been extraordinary : The Duchess of Bedford presented it to Henry vi. ; but we find it next in the possession of Henry n. of France. After an interval of oblivion, it was purchased from Sir Robert Worsley's widow, early in the eighteenth century, by Edward, second Earl of Oxford, from whom it passed to his daughter, the Duchess of Portland ; then it was successively sold, in 1786 to Mr. Edwards, a book- seller, in 1815 to the Duke of Maryborough, and in 1833 to Sir John Tobin, whose son disposed of it to the bookseller from whom the British Museum purchased it in 1852, thus placing it once more with the Harleian Collection. PLATE III. (SACRAMENTARY). Bodl. MS., Auct. D. I. 20, fol. 1 20, lower part. (Written in the ninth century.) This is an example (reproduced by photo-lithography) of ninth-century Continental writing and ornamentation, containing part of the Mass on the occasion of the dedication of a church of St. Michael. The first five lines are : Sanctorum, per dominum nostrum. Ill Kalendas Octobres id est XX. \ VI II I die mensis Septembris. dedicatio basilic^ sancti angeli michaelis | Deus qui miro \ ordine angelorum \ mysteria hominumqut dispensas. \ A fair representation of square capital (see page 25) is given by line 3, of Rustic Capitals (see page 26) in lines i, 2, and 9, of uncial (see page 26) by line 4, and of ninth-century Carolingian minuscule by the rest (see page 27). The con- tracted style of Rustic capitals is well shown, and the rounded character of the ordinary hand, as opposed to the Gothic hand which follows. PLATE IV. (SCRIBE AT WORK). Paris (National Library) MS., Fonds frangais 9,198, fol. 19. (Written in 1456, at the Hague, by Jean Mielot, secretary to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.) Notes on I Ihistrations xiii This is a representation of Jean Mielot himself, writing his collection of Miracles of Our Lady in French, reproduced in collotype (by permission) from the collotype which is given in G. F. Warner's Miracles de Nostre Dame, 1885, but reduced to about one-half the linear size. The scribe is writing on a large roll of parchment held steady by a weight, and holds in his left hand a knife for erasure (?), or possibly an instrument to keep the parchment firm without the contact of the hand- Above, on a separate desk, is the MS. to be copied, and by the side are three ink-bottles, while paint-pots hang on the wall. On the spectator's right is an armarium, or cupboard, holding other manuscripts, the upper part of which displays drawers which contain books, pens, and, apparently, a double eye-glass for purposes of close inspection. The volumes lying about afford ffood illustrations of binding. PLATE V. (APOCALYPSE). Bodl. MS., Douce 180, p. 61. (Written about A.D. 1280, probably in France.) This MS. contains the Apocalypse, with a commentary in Latin, and is reproduced by photo-lithography, reduced to about one-half the linear size of the original. Illumination. The subject is the delivery of the Seven Vials to the Seven Angels by one of the Four Beasts (Rev. xv. 5-7) : the door of the Temple is represented in the background. It is in outline only, without colour, but the faces and general style are French or Anglo-Norman. Writing. The Gothic angular character, which came in in the thirteenth century (see page 30). The first three lines of the text and commentary are : (i) Et units ex quatuor anima \ libus dedit septem angelis \ septem phialas aureas plenas : (2) Quatuor animalia quamuis quatuor euangelis \ tas signi- ficent. tamen &* simul &* singulatim christum sig \ nificent. Set quia breuitas non permittit ut dicamus. The contrast between the rounded Carolingian minuscule and this set of letters, which are chiefly composed of straight lines, is well marked. xiv Notes on Illustrations PLATE VI. (ST. MICHAEL). Bodl. MS., Douce 144, fol. 129'. (Written in A.D. 1407 in the Diocese of Paris.) Illumination. This plate, a collotype, reduced by about one-fourth in linear size, from a Book of Hours, represents St. Michael the Archangel slaying the Dragon. The inner margin is of a florid formal style, and rather in fourteenth-century style : the outer one is ' ivy-leaf work, and contains a repre- sentation of a soul weighed in the balance, and in the lower part a grotesque. The diaper background is also rather of the fourteenth than the fifteenth century in style. The colours are chiefly red, blue, and gold ; St. Michael's mantle is red, but inside, green; his wings, green and yellow; his armour, a steely blue : the red and blue diapers contain a 'fleur-de-lys : : all the gold is of course burnished. Writing. Michael archangele teeni in ad \ iutorium populo dei. Versct. \ In conspectu angelorum psallam \ tibi deus meus. Respons. \ This is the beginning of the special service for St. Michael, often found in a Book of Hours, giving the intro- ductory sentence, the Versicle, and the rubric of the Respond ; the rubrics being in French. PLATE VII. (SEND INSCRIPTION). A photo-lithograph from the engraving in Lepsius's AuswaM, the size of the original monument being i ft. 6\ in. x 3 ft. 7-!- in. The following description is abbreviated from G. J. Chester's Catalogue of the Egyptian Antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1881), page 47 : A limestone cornice of the false door of a tomb on which, on the left, is a seated figure of S'era, a royal relative, a priest of Sent, king of the second dynasty. At the opposite side is the seated figure of Xenttek. a female, called Mare'st, an unknown title. Between them is a table, covered with reeds, on which is meat. At each end is a basin and water-jug. Above and below the hieroglyphs mention Notes on Illustrations xv incense, dates, wine, loaves, linen, flesh, etc., all offerings to the king. ' This is, perhaps, the earliest Egyptian sculpture known.' The cartouche in the centre of the upper line contains the king's name, thus ( ^ s )= Send, alphabetically written (!) and the N and D (see page 23) are the symbols which eventually became our corresponding letters. PLATE VIII. (CAEDMON). Bodl. MS., Junius n, p. 66. (Written about A.D. 1000 in a West-Saxon hand : reduced to about one-half the linear size.) Illumination. The Ark, with animals on board : the type of vessel appears to be Norse. The drapery, postures, and faces are distinctively Old English. The side-rudder, dragon- shaped boat, and architectural details of the erection on deck are noticeable. Writing (first three lines). Noe freme. swa him nergend heht. hyrde tham hal \ gan. heofon cyninge ongan. ofostJice that hof wyrcan. \ micle mere cieste, magum sagde. that IVCES threalic thing. \ The style is pointed Old English, and characteristic Hiberno-Saxon forms of letters are the g, f, and r : observe also the high e, and the Old English letters, th (thorn) and w (wen), as well as the barred <5 in line 4 and elsewhere. ST, MARK. FROM THE BEDFORD HOURS. BOOKS IN MANUSCRIPT, CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. THE word ' Manuscript' (often written MS., in plural MSS.) is derived directly from the Latin expression codices manu scripti (books written by hand), and has always implied precisely what is indicated by its derivation. It is distinguished on the one hand from printed books (codices impressi, libri impress?), and on the other hand from kinds of record not naturally described as handwriting, such as inscrip- tions cut in stone and metal and wood, or stamped work like coins. We, who are accustomed to a profusion of printed books, may, at first thought, be tempted to think lightly of the value and the interest of the study of written records, and this first natural tendency is furthered by the undoubted fact that the manuscripts met with in our ordinary life are the most ephemeral of all the literature presented to us, largely consisting of private records of no permanent value. Even in matters of law, where the importance of ancient A Books in Manuscript records as establishing or refuting a claim cannot be overlooked, the tendency of modern legislation is to make possession even more than ' nine-tenths of the law,' and to bar all claims which have not been recently asserted. Similarly, the modern politician finds little to incite him to a study of palaeography, and trusts to the printing-press to supply him with material. But a student cannot too clearly set before himself the simple fact that, until four and a half centuries ago (A.D. 1440, say), every record was a written one. Every monument of literature, every treatise of philosophy, every sacred writing which is older than the fifteenth century, whether preserved to us by the thinnest possible thread of transmission, as are Tacitus and Catullus, or by a body of evidence such as that which supports the New Testament or Virgil, all this has come down to us solely and singly by the vehicle of thought which is the special subject of this book. For centuries such works were exposed to all the chances and imperfections which attend the scribe and pen, and, in the light of modern discoveries con- nected with writing, we can never safely claim that a printed edition supersedes further study and com- parison of the manuscripts on which it is based. And there is another reason why the study of manuscripts is never likely to be a mere antiquarian pursuit. When modern books on historical subjects, written in the current style of literature and in the language of the day, are read, the student naturally Introductory 3 finds very considerable difficulty in realising the actual surroundings of the time described. It is inevitable that to some extent this should be so ; but historians now endeavour to minimise it, by presenting in or side by side with their narrative, selections of original documents. These are wonderful helps to appreciation of the time, left in their old spelling and phraseology. It is to the same feeling that we owe the growing practice of profusely illustrating books. But a manuscript before one is more than all this, as every reader in the Public Record Office and every possessor of old historical records know. A despatch from Cromwell, hastily written during some cam- paign, an order from Charles I. marked ' for the printer,' but set aside in consequence of a hurried departure, brings the scene better before us than any laboured description, and there is a freshness in dealing with such records which no modern book can supply. The terrible neglect of manuscripts in the past whether historical, liturgical, or literary shows how many centuries we have taken to learn this lesson. And once more, modern readers who are accus- tomed to skim the Times every morning and a novel every week, when set down before some important historical work, feel that their minds arc as it were unstrung and incapable of close attention and sustained effort. They are tempted to glance super- ficially through volumes which ought to be impressed on the mind, and profit little by the process. For Books in Manuscript these and such as these the study of an original document in manuscript, a court-roll, a charter, a page of a chronicle, an old political poem, is the one corrective which suits the disease, a bracing, invigorating, and, it may be added, an attractive exercise, the contact of Antaeus with his mother earth. The aim of this short book is to familiarise the possessor of a private collection of MSS., or one who is about to enter on the study of them, with some salient points about ancient writing ; with the forms and kinds of books, and the conditions under which they were produced and illustrated, and with some of the principles by which the errors of a copyist are corrected. It will be lighter work, perhaps, to give a brief account of some famous public and private collections, and of the vicissitudes and romances of a few particular volumes. Finally, the proper treat- ment and cataloguing of such books will also deserve attention, and a list of the more useful works already produced on the subjects treated, with some statistics of libraries, will form a natural appendix. CHAPTER II. MATERIALS FOR WRITING, AND FORMS OF BOOKS. A . Materials. PROBABLY the earliest efforts of the human race to record its thoughts and history were by scratching with some hard instrument on stone. The perman- ence of the result has always made stone or metal a favourite substance to receive engraving for sepulchral tablets, for official records, such as State decrees, and for honorary inscriptions. Among obvious examples are the drawings of prehistoric man on the \valls of caves, the Ten Commandments graven on stone, the Nicene Creed cut in silver by Pope Leo III.'s order to fix the absolute form decreed by the second General Council, the Parian Chronicle, the Rosetta Stone, and tombs of all ages. It is on stone almost alone that we find in the early classical days of Rome the pure capital forms of letters, as on the tombs of the Scipios. And as material tends to act on style, and as curves are harder to grave than straight lines, writing on stone tends to discard the one and to encourage the other, so that we find in such inscriptions a decided pre- ference for angular forms of letters. Books in Manuscript But another very early material for writing was the wood or bark of trees. It was common, soft, and fairly durable. Three of our common terms are derived from the custom of cutting or scratching on wooden boards or bark, the Latin liber (a book, properly the bark of a tree, whence such words as library, libretto], the Latin codex (or caudex, a tree-stump, then sawn boards, then a book, now narrowed to a manuscript book ; compare codicil, a diminutive form), and perhaps the Teutonic word which appears in German as Buck and in English as book, meaning originally a beech tree and beechen boards. Next we come to the substance which has given us much of the terminology of books. A common reed, chiefly found in Egypt, and known to the Greeks as xdvvpos (papuros], and to the Romans as papyrus, was discovered to be, when properly pre- pared, a facile and cheap material for writing. The inner rind was cut lengthways into thin strips (SijSXo/, bubloi], and laid in order thus : On this were glued, with the help of rich Nile water or other substance, another set of slips laid on the former transversely, thus : This cross-formed substance, properly pressed, hammered and dried, presented a smooth but soft receptive surface for ink, and was most extensively used in classical times until parch- ment competed with it, or, more accurately, till the export of papyrus began to fail. The papyrus, Materials for Writing, and Forms of Books 7 however, was not used in the form of our books, but as a long roll, with the writing in broad columns placed thus, the writing being represented by a wavy line : Birt, in his Antike Bucliwesen (1882), has shown that there was a normal length of about thirty-eight letters in each line, but the length of the entire roll might be anything up to 150 feet. Lately it has been discovered that there is a face and a back to papyri, a right and a wrong side for writing. In the British Museum there is a papyrus roll containing, in Greek, the funeral oration of Hypcrides on Leos- thenes, B.C. 323 ; on the other side of this is a horoscope of a person born in A.D. 95. Naturally, for some time it was believed that the horoscope was casually inscribed on the back of the Hyperides ; but a closer examination has proved that the horoscope is on the face of the papyrus, and the Hyperides perhaps a school exercise accidentally entered on the back. So that A.D. 95 is not the terminus ad quern of the date, but the terminus a quo. Unfortunately, of all possible materials for per- manent record, papyrus is among the worst. Even when first written on, it must have seemed ominous that a heavy stroke was wont to pierce and scratch Books in Manuscript the smooth surface, so much so that in all papyrus records the writing is of necessity light, and hardly distinguishable into up and down strokes. This foreshadowed the time when, on the complete drying of the substance in course of years, the residuum would be fragile, friable, and almost as brittle as dead leaves. Every papyrus that comes into a library should therefore be at once placed between two sheets of glass, to prevent, as far as possible, all further disintegration. The terms used in connexion with writing in Greek, Latin and English are chiefly derived from the rolls of papyrus. Let us begin with two words which have had an interesting history. Our ' paper ' is derived from the Greek vawpos (papuros ; in Latin, papyrus), explained above as the name of an Egyptian reed. Thence it came to mean the papyrus as pre- pared to receive writing. How then has/tf/ter, which has always been made out of rags, usurped the name without taking over the material? Simply because the term came to signify whatever substance was commonly employed for writing ; so when papyrus was disused (the latest date of its systematic use is the eleventh century), a material formed of rags was beginning to be in fashion, and carried on, so to speak, the term. The Latin cJiarta (paper) has had a partly similar history, for when first found it is applied to papyrus as distinguished from parchment. Still more interesting is the word Bible. Bu/3/.o/ (bubloi) was the Greek term for the strips of the inner bark Materials for Writing, and Forms of Books 9 of papyrus. Then the book formed of papyrus began to be called jSlfSxo; (biblos) and /3//3/./W (biblion, a diminutive form). The Romans took across the second word, but chiefly used it in the plural, biblia, which came later to be regarded as a feminine singular, as if its genitive were biblice and not bibliornm. Lastly, the word became specially and exclusively applied to The Book, the Bible, and as such has passed into English. Other terms which recall the days of papyrus are volume (Latin, volumen, 1 a thing rolled up,' from vol-co, I roll ; corresponding to the Greek xfaivdpos, kulindros\ the long stretch of papyrus rolled up for putting away ; the Latin term evolvere, to unroll, in the sense of ' to read ' a book ; and the common wordexptmt, equivalent to 'the end,' but properly meaning 'unrolled,' ' explicitus] the end of the roll having been reached. So, too, the custom of writing on parchment with three or even four columns to a single page, as may be seen in our most ancient Greek MSS. of the New Testament, is probably a survival of the parallel columns of writing found on papyrus. We next come to the most satisfactory material ever discovered for purposes of writing and illumina- tion, tough enough for preservation to immemorial time, hard enough to bear thick strokes of pen or brush without the surface giving way, and yet fine enough for the most delicate ornamentation. Parch- ment is the prepared skin of animals, especially of the sheep and calf; the finer quality derived from io Books in Manuscript the calf being properly vellum ; and if from the skin of the calf's intestines, uterine vellum, the whitest and thinnest kind known, and used chiefly for elaborate miniatures. Parchment has neither the fragile surface of papyrus nor the coarseness of mediaeval paper, and has therefore long enjoyed the favour of writers. Its only disadvantages in mediaeval times were its com- parative costliness and its thickness and weight, but neither of these was a formidable obstacle to its use. The name of this substance contains its history. In the first half of the second century before Christ, Eumenes II., King of Pergamum, found himself de- barred, through some jealousy of the Ptolemies, from obtaining a sufficient supply of papyrus from Egypt. From necessity he had recourse to an ancient custom of preparing skins for the reception of writing, by washing, dressing and rubbing them smooth ; probably adding some new appliances, by which his process became so famous that the material itself was called Uipya-iwri ; in Latin, Pergamena, 'stuff prepared at Pergamum,' whence the English word parchment. Both parchment and paper have had less effect than stone or papyrus on styles of writing, because both are adapted to receive almost any stroke of the pen. They have rather allowed styles to develop them- selves naturally, and are specially favourable to the flowing curves which are as easy as they are graceful in human penmanship. Paper has for long been the common substance for miscellaneous purposes of ordinary writing, and has Materials for Writing, and Forms of Books 11 at all times been formed exclusively from rags (chiefly of linen), reduced to a pulp, poured out on a frame in a thin watery sheet, and gradually dried and given consistence by the action of heat. It has been a popular belief, found in every book till 1886 (now entirely disproved, but probably destined to die hard), that the common yellowish thick paper, with rough fibrous edge, found especially in Greek MSS. till the fifteenth century, was paper of quite another sort, and made of cotton (charta boinbycina, bombyx being usually silk, but also used of any fine fibre such as cotton). The microscope has at last conclusively shown that these two papers are simply two different kinds of ordinary linen-rag paper. A few facts about the dates at which papyrus, parchment and paper are found may be inserted here. The use of papyrus in Egypt is of great antiquity, and the bulk of the earliest Greek and Latin writings we possess are on papyrus ; in the case of Greek of the third century B.C., in Latin of the first century A.D. It was freely exported to Greece and Rome, and, though it gave way before parchment, it was not till the tenth century A.D. that in Egypt itself its use was abandoned. Practically in about A.D. 935 its fabrication ceased, although for Pontifical Bulls it was invariably used till A.D. 1022, and occasionally till 1050. Parchment has also been used from the earliest times ; and its use was revived, as we have seen, in the second century before Christ, and lasted till the invention of printing, after which it was 1 2 Books in Manuscript reserved for sumptuous editions, and for legal and other records. Paper was first manufactured (outside China) at Samarkand in Turkestan in about A.D. 750; and even in Spain, where first it obtained a footing in Europe (in the tenth century), it was imported from the East, not being manufactured in the West till the twelfth century ; but from that time its use spread rapidly. In England there was a paper-mill at Hertford shortly before 1470, owned by one John Tate ; but no book was printed on English paper till 1495, when Bartholomews Glanville's De proprietatibus renim was issued on native paper. Watermarks in paper (see p. 15) are entirely a Western invention, found first towards the end of the thirteenth century, and never found at all in Oriental paper. Besides stone, papyrus, parchment, and paper, the materials used for writing, though numerous, are rather curious than important. Tablets of wood, hinged like a book and covered with wax, on which letters were scratched by a small pointed metal rod (stilus, whence our words style, stiletto, etc.), were common at Rome in classical and later times, and are believed to have suggested the form of our ordinary books. For private accounts and notes these wax tablets are said to have been quite common in Western Europe until the time of print- ing. Various metals, especially lead, have been made use of to bear writing ; and also bones (in prehistoric times), clay inscribed when soft and then Materials for Writing, and Forms of Books 13 baked (as in Assyria), potsherds (ostraka), and the like. B. Forms of Books. We now come to the forms of books the way in which they are made up. In the case of papyrus, as has already been observed, we almost always find the roll-form. This long strip was, of course, rolled round a stick or two sticks (one at each end) when not in use, very much as a wall-map is at the present day. With parchment the case has been different. Though in classical times in Rome, so far as can be judged, the roll-form was still in ordinary use even when parchment was the material, and though, in the form of court-rolls, pedigrees, and many legal kinds of record, we are still familiar with the appear- ance of a roll, the tendency of writers on parch- ment has been to establish and perpetuate the form of book best known at the present day, in which pages are turned over by the reader, and not membranes unrolled. The normal formation of a parchment book in the Middle Ages was this : four pieces of parchment, each roughly about 10 inches high and 18 inches broad, were taken and were folded once across, so that each piece formed four pages (two leaves) of what we should call a quarto volume. These pieces were then fitted one inside another, so that the first piece formed the ist and 8th leaves, the second the 2nd and 7th, the third the 3rd and 6th, and the Books in Manuscript fourth the two middle leaves of a complete section of eight leaves or sixteen pages, termed technically in Latin a quaternio, because made of four (guatuor) pieces of parchment. When a sufficient number of quaternions were thus formed to contain the projected book, they were sent in to the scribe for writing on, and eventually bound. Many variations of form, both smaller and larger than quarto, are found, and often more or fewer pieces than four make up the section. Paper was essentially different from parchment, in that it could be made of larger size and folded smaller ; whereas the cost of skins was almost pro- hibitive, if very large and fine pieces were required. As a fact, paper has almost always been used in book and not roll-form. The normal formation of paper- books has been this: a piece about 12 inches high by 1 6 inches wide was regarded as a standard size. This was folded across along the dotted line a b, and if this singly-folded sheet was re- garded as the basis of a section, and the whole book was made up of a set of these sections, it was called a folio book ; if, however, the singly - folded sheet was folded again across the dotted line c d, and this was treated as a section (con- taining four leaves or eight pages), the book made up of such sections was called a quarto. Once more, if the doubly-folded sheet was again folded along the Materials for Writing, and Forms of Books 15 dotted line e f, and this trebly - folded sheet was treated as a section (containing eight leaves or sixteen pages), the book was called an octavo. The methods of folding the sheet so as to produce a duodecimo, a i6mo, etc., and the use of half-sheets to form sections, are matters which concern printing rather than writing. But it should be clearly understood that, whereas we now mean by a folio a tall narrow book, by a quarto a shorter broad book, and by an octavo a short narrow book, judging by size and shape ; in the earlier days of paper, these terms indicated, not size or even shape, but form, that is to say, the way in which the sheets of paper were folded up to form sections, and that it is only owing to the fact that a certain size of paper was generally adopted as a standard that the terms came to have their modern signification. So true is this, that some early folios are quite small, and many quartos larger or smaller than what we call quarto. But there is one infallible test of a true folio, quarto, or octavo. Observe the diamond on the figures on p. 14, and the lines drawn across them. The diamond represents the water- mark, a trade design (such as a jug, an unicorn, a pair of scissors, etc.) inserted by the maker in every sheet, and the lines are ' chain - lines,' the marks where the wire frame supported the half liquid paper - sheet as it gathered consistency by being dried. The position of the watermark and the direction of the chain-lines were fortunately invari- 1 6 Books in Manuscript able, and therefore (as may be easily seen by a paper model) every true folio has the watermark in the centre of a page and the chain-lines perpendicular ; every quarto has the watermark in the centre of the back, not easy to see, and the lines horizontal ; and every octavo has a watermark at the top of the back at the inner edge, and the lines perpen- dicular. C. Instruments and Ink. On this subject few words are necessary. For hard substances and for wax and clay, a graving pen or pointed metal rod is necessary ; for papyrus, parch- ment and paper, a pen. Pens have till modern times always been of- one of two kinds, either made of a reed (calamus, arundo, a reed-pen), or made of a quill, usually from a bird's feather (penna, a quill-pen). The latter appears to be the later in invention, but is found as early as the sixth century of our era. Ink (atramentunf) has hardly varied in composition from the earliest times, having been always formed in one of two ways : either, as was the common practice in classical times, by a mixture of soot with gum and water, which produces a black lustrous ink, but is without much difficulty removed with a sponge ; or by galls (gallic acid) with sulphate of iron and gum, which is the modern method, though also so ancient as to be found on the Herculanean rolls. At Pompeii ink of this kind was found still liquid after seventeen centuries of quiescence. The chief Materials for Writing ; and Forms of Books 17 coloured inks known to antiquity were red, purple, green, and yellow : gold and silver solutions were sometimes used, especially when the parchment had been stained purple to enhance the effect. For the colours used in illumination, Chapter V. may be consulted. So far we have been concerned with passive sub- stances prepared and presented to the scribe, to become instinct with life when the message of the author is consigned to the expectant page. Our next chapters will naturally treat of the writing itself, and of scribes and their ways, the living elements in a book. CHAPTER III. THE HISTORY OF WRITING. AFTER the invention of speech, the invention of writing was only a question of time. No race of human beings which could speak would rest for long contented with oral communication, but would en- deavour, whether for the transmission of a message or for permanent record, to represent words by visible characters. And as early speech made large use of the imitative (onomatopceetic) faculty, so primitive writing made free use of pictures, first to represent material things, and then by a further advance of its infant powers to represent ideas suggested by material things. These two stages are known as ideographic, ideograms meaning either pictures or for the second stage pictorial symbols. It is curious to note that the contents of an ordinary printer's case of type show an ideogram still in use. What is ^ but a ' pictorial symbol,' saying as clearly as in words, ' Look there ! ' ? So, too, the ' Roman ' numerals I, II, III, IIII are in all probability pictures of one, two, three, and four fingers held up, just as V is the whole hand, the four fingers being grouped together as one and the thumb as the other limb of the figure. 18 The History of Writing 19 X is probably simply two Vs ; but the higher Roman numerals were not needed by primitive man, and seem not to be ideographic. Savages still use this picture-language ; and Dr. Isaac Taylor, in his History of the Alphabet, gives a striking illustration of a record of a raid made by North American Indians in A.D. 1762, in which almost every part is pure picture writing ! The third stage was perhaps the most momentous, and consisted in fixing a written symbol, not to some object or idea, but to a particular sound, whatever objects or ideas that sound might call up ; as would be the case if the mark H3^ were not taken to represent ' Look ! ' or ' attend ! ' or ' there ! ' but the sound ' there,' so that it would stand for ' there ' or ' their.' This, the ' phonographic ' stage, is the one in which we now are, and consists naturally of three steps (i) when the written symbol represents a whole word, (2) when it expresses a single syllable, (3) when it represents a single letter, as in our present alphabetical writing. The first two of these may be illustrated by the use of & for et in Latin, coupled with its usage in certain centuries in any word con- taining -et-, so that we find fier&)perpQnms> and the like ; for in these latter examples the symbol means the sound et and not the word et. The third is, of course, our own usage. The letters which we use in writing and printing have had a history which exhibits in most cases, in spite of our imperfect records, every one of the five 2o Books in Manuscript stages described above. We will briefly trace this line, giving the ancestry of the English alphabet, and selecting the letters D and M for illustration. The pedigree is this : TILL Egyptian (Hieroglyphic), ) _ . /TT . \ Hamitic. i/gyptian (Hieratic), . about rgth cent. B.C. ) Old Semitic, . . ) _ [ Semitic. Phoenician, . . . about uoo B.C. ) Old Greek, . . . close of gth cent. B.C. \ Latin,. . . . about 600 A. D. > Aryan. English, The most extraordinary fact in this line is the transference of the alphabet on two separate occa- sions from one race of languages to another. Each race has its peculiar sounds, vowel and consonantal, and a transference of the symbols without the actual sounds would seem a clumsy and unworkable feat. And our surprise is not lessened when we consider three points in which Semitic languages differ from all others known (i) they are written from right to left, (2) the Semitic alphabet proper has no true vowels, (3) it has never varied from twenty-two letters, whereas the Aryan alphabets constantly vary in the number and phonetic value of the letters. For twenty- eight centuries have the Semitic languages preserved these peculiarities ; and that men were able to accom- plish the feat of transference to and from a Semitic alphabet, is a wonderful testimony to human powers of adaptation. The earliest Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing pre- The History of Writing 2 1 served to us is probably that which is cut on a stone tablet 1 in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and carries us back to a priest employed in the cult of the Egyptian king Sent, not later than about 4000 B.C. This inscription is still said to be the oldest written record in the world. In this, as well as in later records, we find all five stages coexisting ! This fact will serve to impress on us the immense antiquity of Egyptian writing and of alphabetical writing, and the slowness with which civilisation progresses ; for we find alphabetical symbols in B.C. 4000, and purely pictorial symbols in A.D. 1762, though the latter is as certainly prior in conception to the former as the dawn precedes the day. By the nineteenth century B.C. the ancient Hiero- glyphic picture writing of Egypt was worn down to what is known as Hieratic, in which the symbols would not be at once recognised as pictures, though based on them. In about this century, probably just when the Israelites were in Egypt, the great trans- ference took place : a Semitic people adopted the Egyptian symbols, using them for what is known as Old Semitic, as seen in the Siloam inscription at Jerusalem, and the Moabite Stone now (so far as it has survived) in the Louvre at Paris. We have no evidence whatever of the way in which the Phoenicians acquired and adopted the Old Semitic symbols ; and till recently the weak link of the whole chain of connexion was at this point, the doubt being, 1 See illustration opposite p. 92, 22 Books in Manuscript not whether Greek, Latin, and English writing was deduced from Phoenician (for that has been univer- sally conceded), but whether and how Phoenician came from Old Semitic. However, the opinions of De Rouge and others have been generally accepted, and the very high probability they have established is not likely to be lessened by future discoveries. It is instructive to see what solid truth is thus to be found in the old Greek legend of Cadmus, which represents him as a Phoenician of Tyre, yet intimately connected with Egypt, and as having introduced into Greece from Phoenicia or Egypt an alphabet of sixteen letters. For the Greeks did most undoubtedly derive their own alphabet from the Phoenician, adapting Semitic symbols to an Aryan set of sounds, and caused it to be used in Greece itself and over all the shores of the ^Egean. The Greek alphabet thus acquired was carried by the Chalcidians of Eubcea, at about the end of the ninth century B.C., to one of their Italian colonies, the well-known town of Cumse in Campania, and, for some reason not recorded in history, was taken up by the one Italian people destined to found an empire, the earliest in- habitants of Rome. The result may be told in Dr. Isaac Taylor's words : 'It became the alphabet of Latin Christendom, and the literary alphabet of Europe and America. It is now, with the single exception of the Arabic, the only alphabet possessing any claim to cosmopolitan extension.' The letter D.is a good example of the changes : The History of Writing Hieroglyphic, a view of the hand, the thumb projecting above (see plate opposite p. 92). Clearly the essen- tial point about the figure is, not the view of the ringers, but the projection of the thumb ; accordingly in Hieratic the form is *^"\x preserving the thumb- line. In Old Semitic this became <\^, an angular form due to inscriptions (see p. 5), perpetuated in the Greek A, but rounded in Latin to D, and in later forms to 5, d., d. Or take the letter M. In Hieroglyphic this is a side view of an owl, with his face turned towards the spectator XT\ . The owl was mulak, and so when the symbol became syllabic it represented mu> and when alphabetic m. Later the owl loses its ears and tail, but still recalls the picture Q"^ ; in Hieratic it has come to 3, the upper curve representing the head and the lower the rounded back, all else being dropped as unessential. This in Old Semitic appears as VVJ, in Greek as M, in Latin capitals the same, and in smaller letters, from an attempt to write it quickly, ;;/. Let us now trace in rather more detail the history of writing in Western Europe from Roman times to our own. Much of the significance and most of our appreciation of the manuscript volumes to be here- after described will be lost if we do not see clearly, even if in outline only, the changes of writing which mark the principal eras and nationalities which suc- ceeded the empire of Rome. The following table will illustrate the course and connexion of each kind : Books in Manuscript w PH O W w H CO W CO O Q < ffi I u C 3 ^ > 1 ly '~~ y H -3 'x O S > "7 ~a I ^ " g W~ 3 -O X c -'i o U _ G -bo C W The History of Writing 25 The great fundamental division of writing, which is applicable to all periods and peoples, is that which puts on one side the common, ordinary hand in private use, the hand which we and all our ancestors have used in writing letters, setting down accounts, keeping diaries, and scribbling, which is Cursive; and puts on the other side the writing reserved for literary monuments, the ornamental, set, careful, impressive hand which we now, owing to the printing-press, hardly know, but in which monks wrote out chronicles, in which old service books were produced, in which legal and regal trans- actions, and everything which seemed to deserve immortal record, were enshrined. We ourselves usually have two hands, if we only notice them, a careless private one, and a formal calligraphic style. Our survey of Western handwritings naturally begins with the Roman Capital writing. The sudden remark of every one who is shown a specimen for the first time is, how extremely like our own printed capitals ! Take a facsimile of a MS. written in Roman square capitals every letter from A to Z will be found shaped as ours, except W, which does not exist in Latin, and J, U, which are not distinct from I, V. How this comes to be, in a subject where all is change, will be seen as we proceed. Pure square capitals are hard to find in writing as distinguished from inscriptions, but exist, for instance, in the fragments of Virgil in the library of St. Gall (fourth or fifth century A.D. : Palceogr. Soc. i. plate 26 Books in Manuscript 208). But the first declension from the pure type, namely Rustic Capitals, is not uncommon. In this all the letters are capital, but are thinner, compressed laterally as it were, while the numerous horizontal strokes on the right hand of an ordinary capital are often prolonged to the left. Thus E becomes I, T becomes I. The first great change is, however, the Uncial hand, which from meaning originally letters an inch (undo) long, came to be used for a kind in which all the letters are still capital, except that A, D, E, H, M, O have become &, 6, 6, b,(D,9- The next step is the still commoner Half- Uncial hand, in which the general appearance is no longer capital, and indeed only N and F are clearly and unmistakably of that nature ; the rest approximating in shape rather to our small printed letters, as in p, m, f (s), T" (0- (See plate opposite p. 29 for Capital and Uncial.) In the seventh and eighth centuries we find the first tendency to form national hands, resulting in the Merovingian or Prankish hand, the Lombardic of Italy, and the Visigothic of Spain. These are the first difficult hands which we encounter ; and when we remember that the object of writing is to be clear and distinct, and that the test of a good style is that it seizes on the essential points in which letters differ, and puts aside the flourishes and orna- ments which disguise the simple form, we shall see how much a strong influence was needed to prevent writing from becoming obscure and degraded. That influence was found in Charles the Great. The History of Writing 27 In the field of writing it has been granted to no person but Charles the Great to influence profoundly the history of the alphabet. With rare insight and rarer taste he discountenanced the prevalent Mero- vingian hand, and substituted an eclectic hand, known as the Carolingian Minuscule, which may still be re- garded as a model of clearness and elegance. The chief instrument in this reform was Alcuin of York, whom Charles placed, partly for this purpose, at the head of the School of Tours in A.D. 796. The selection of an Englishman for the post naturally leads us to inquire what hands were then used in England, and what amount of English influence the Carolingian Minuscule, the foundation of our modern styles, exhibits. If we gaze in wonder on the personal influence of Charles the Great in reforming handwriting, we shall be still more struck by the spectacle presented to us by Ireland in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. It is the great marvel in the history of writing. Modern historians have at last appreciated the blaze of life, religious, literary, and artistic, which was kindled in the ' Isle of Saints ' within a century after St. Patrick's coming (about A.D. 450) ; how the enthusiasm kindled by Christianity in the Celtic nature so far transcended the limits of the island, and indeed of Great Britain, that Irish missionaries and monks were soon found in the chief religious centres of Gaul, Germany, Switzerland, and North Italy, while foreigners found their toilsome way to 28 Books in Manuscript Ireland to learn Greek ! But less prominence has been given to the artistic side of this great reflex movement from West to East than to the other two. The simple facts attest that in the seventh century, when our earliest existing Irish MSS. were written, we find not only a style of writing (or indeed two) distinctive, national, and of a high type of excellence, but also a school of illumination which, in the combined lines of mechanical accuracy and intricacy, of fertile invention of form and figure and of striking arrangements of colour, has never been surpassed. And this is in the seventh century the nadir of the rest of Europe ! The great Irish school of writing and painting passed over to England by way of the monasteries founded by Irish monks in Scotland. The first monastery in England thus founded by settlers from the North was Lindisfarne (A.D. 635). But in 597 St. Augustine of Canterbury had landed in Kent, and with him brought the old Roman half-uncial hand still to be seen in the two Latin books of the Gospels, traditionally supposed to be among those actually brought by Augustine, and now preserved at Cambridge and Oxford. These two forces, the Roman and the Irish half-uncial hands, may be said to have met at the Council of Whitby in 664. Was Augustine or Aidan, Rome or Ireland, destined to supply us with our English national hand ? The Irish hand won the day, and the ' Hiberno-Saxon ' hand became the national hand of England, Scot- X The History of Writing 29 land, and Ireland until the Norman Conquest at last reversed the national victory of Whitby, and the Roman or Continental hand, which had never wholly lost its footing in England, excluded its rival. It is certain, then, that Alcuin was trained in Hiberno- Saxon calligraphy, so that we may be surprised to find that the writing which, under Charles the Great, he developed at Tours, bears hardly a trace of the style to which he was accustomed. En revanche, in the ornamentation and illumination of the great Carolingian volumes which have come down to our times, we find those constant, persistent traces of English and Irish work which we seek for in vain in the plainer writing. This minuscule superseded all others almost throughout the empire of Charles the Great, and during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries underwent very little modification. Even in the two next centuries, though it is subject to general modification, national differences are hardly observ- able, and we can only distinguish two large divisions, the group of Northern Europe (England, North France, and the Netherlands), and the Southern (South France, Italy, and Spain). The two excep- tions are, that Germany, both in writing and paint- ing, has always stood apart, and lags behind the other nations of Western Europe in its develop- ment ; and that England retains her Hiberno-Saxon hand till after the Conquest of 1066. It may be noted that the twelfth century produced the finest 30 Books in Manuscript writing ever known a large, free and flowing form of the minuscule of Tours. In the next century comes in the angular Gothic hand, the difference between which and the twelfth century hand may be fairly understood by a comparison of ordinary German and Roman type. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the writing of each country may be discerned, while the general tendency is towards com- plication, use of abbreviations and contractions, and development of unessential parasitic forms of letters (see plates facing pp. 56, 58). How, then, to revert to a previous question, does it come about that our modern capitals are like those of ancient Rome, and our ordinary letters, as printed, so like the Carolingian minuscule ? This we can now answer. The early printers of the second half of the fifteenth century took as their models one or other of two kinds of letters, either the current Gothic hand, of which modern German type is the direct outcome, or the luxurious style which itself a revival of the clear twelfth century writing was adopted in Italy by the scribes of the Renaissance. This latter set of forms, through the collective good sense of successive genera- tions, won its way, and secured for all future time the neat, easily read and sensible forms of the familiar Roman type. We see, then, that readers of the present day owe their eyesight and their comfort to (i) the revival of pure forms of an old Roman kind by Charles the Great ; (2) the seemingly accidental fact that the later Carolingian writing of the twelfth The History of Writing 31 century was imitated by the Italian scribes of the fifteenth ; (3) the happy natural selection by which printers chose this revived kind of letter. Had any one of these links failed, our type would have failed to attain its undoubted excellence. Of court-hand the stiff, formal writing affected by law courts and royal chanceries our space does not allow us to treat. It has always been, except in the twelfth century, harder to decipher than book-hand ; and it is difficult to doubt that this has been inten- tional, and that in essence court-hand has been more or less an instrument which has helped the lawyers of past times to make their profession exclusive, secret, and mysterious in the eyes of the laity. Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of the handwritings which most nearly concern us. Enough, it may be hoped, has been said to enable our readers to fit roughly into their places the volumes which we may have to describe in future chapters as of such and such an age, style, or nationality. The plates in this volume will supply some further help, and reference may be permitted to the forthcoming Manual of Greek and Roman Palaeography by Dr. E. Maunde Thompson, in the International Scientific Series. CHAPTER IV. SCRIBES AND THEIR WAYS. IN Greece and Rome, scribes (ypa/tpanrz, gram- mateis ; xa\\iypdtpoi, calligraphoi ; scribce) formed a distinct and important profession. We have, how- ever, very little direct evidence, such as would enable us to characterise in any special way their modes of work. We know that in Rome the work was done both quickly and cheaply; the poet Martial, for instance, reminds a friend (Epigr. i. 117) that for five denarii (about 33. 6d.) he could buy the whole of his first book of Epigrams. It would seem natural that when many copies of such a work as Martial's Epigrams or Virgil's ALneid were needed, dictation should be resorted to, and we can picture a room with twenty or more scribes writing from the dictation of some clear-voiced reader ; but the evidence on this point is so scanty, that we are driven to conclude that scribes almost invariably copied from a volume in front of them in silence, as was certainly the case in the scriptoria of monasteries. Alcuin, who describes the copying work at York, seems to know nothing of it, and the word dictare, used in connexion with writing, means ' to compose,' not 32 Scribes and their Ways 33 dictate. 1 The only dictation which was common was when a letter or message was dictated by its composer to swift-penned notarii. But when we reach the age of monasticism, we find full details of the interior and working of the writing-room or scriptorium of a normal religious establishment. While it is true that the great Benedic- tine Order, and its daughter the Cistercian, distinctly encouraged the study of literature, even other than theological, and that, as a fact, more than half the literary work of Europe was done within the walls of religious houses, yet it will be found on examina- tion that the great centres of writing and illumination were comparatively few in number, such as, in Eng- land, Winchester, St. Alban's, Durham, and Glaston- bury ; while, if we regard the smaller houses, one effect of literature and study being a secondary feature in the theory of monastic life, was that only a small proportion of monks were allowed to take up the work, and often, we may be sure, by accident or neglect, the copying would fall into second-rate hands, and, not being in especial repute, be neglected or ill done. Few even of the largest abbeys rose to such full appreciation of the claims of literature, whether reading, composing, or copying, as to have a liistorio- 1 Thus ' Ilic Augustini liber est simul atque Frcnvini : Alter dictavit, alter scribendo notavil, ' only states that Frowinus was the scribe, and that he had copied a treatise of St. Augustine ; see also p. 133. C 34 Books in Manuscript graphus^ or official recorder of the general and local history of the time (such as was Matthew Paris from 1236 to 1259, at St. Alban's), who would give lustre and importance to the whole writing department of the house. Yet at certain times and places the scribe was held in quite conspicuous honour. In Ireland, for instance, in the seventh and eighth centuries, the penalty for shedding his blood was as great as that for killing a bishop or abbot ; and in Scotland, ' scriba ' was regarded as an honourable addition to a bishop's name. Adamnan's Life of St. Columba is full of allusions to the art of writing, in which the Saint himself excelled ; and it is owing to its pro- minence that such stories are permanently recorded, as of the monks who dropped a MS. into a vessel of water, and upset the Saint's own inkhorn. And the vivid picture given us by Sir T. D. Hardy in the Preface to the third volume of the Materials relating to the History of Great Britain, of the estab- lishment at St. Alban's, shows a favourable aspect of the life of copyists in the largest houses. The scriptorium of an ordinary Benedictine monas- tery was a large room, usually over the chapter- house. When no special room was devoted to the purpose, separate little studies were often made in the cloisters, each scribe having a window to himself, as may still be seen in the exquisite cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral (once St. Peter's Abbey) ; but these carrels were fully open on one side to the cloister Scribes and their Ways 35 walk, and it was quite exceptional for a copyist to be allowed a cell or room in any way private. The whole room, or set of studies, was under the general discipline of the monastery, but had special super- added rules of its own. These rules, as preserved to us in certain Benedictine statutes, are as stringent as can well be imagined. Artificial light was entirely forbidden for fear of injuring the manuscripts; and to prevent idleness and interruption, no one was allowed to enter the room besides the scribes, except certain of the higher officers of the abbey. The Armarius was the special officer who had charge of the scrip- torium ; but even he had no power to give out work to be done without the abbot's leave. He had to provide all that was necessary for the work desks, ink, parchment, pens, pen-knives, pumice-stone for smoothing the surface of the parchment, awls to give guiding marks for ruling lines, reading frames to hold the books to be copied, rulers and weights to keep down the pages. The scribe himself was for- bidden to make any alteration in the text, even when the original which he was copying was obviously wrong. Absolute silence was enjoined ; and as, never- theless, some method of communication was necessary, there was a great variety of signs in use. If a scribe needed a book, he extended his hands and made a movement as of turning over leaves. If it was a missal that was wanted, he superadded the sign of a cross ; if a psalter, he placed his hands on his head in the shape of a crown (a reference to King David) ; if 36 Books in Manuscript a lectionary, he pretended to wipe away the grease (which might easily have fallen upon it from a candle); if a small work was needed, not a Bible or service book, but some inferior tractate, he placed one hand on his stomach and the other before his mouth ! Finally, if a pagan work was required, after the general sign, he scratched his ear in the manner of a dog! Besides the monks who acted as scribes and illuminators, there were three classes of secular scribes, who would only come to the monastery when their services were needed illuminatores, when the abbey could not itself provide men capable of finishing off the manuscript by rubrication and painting ; libmrii, a common kind of hack scribe ; and notarii, who would be required for legal purposes, such as drawing up a deed or will. It is not to be wondered at that the customs of a particular monastery, or group of monasteries, should result in a particular localised style of writing. The study of these local peculiarities has not yet been carried far, but will no doubt be a fruitful source of information in the future. For example, it was at one time the custom to ascribe to the hand of Matthew Paris, all volumes written in a peculiar thirteenth century style, with the long stems of certain letters broken-backed or bent, and distin- guished by peculiar orthography, such as imfra for infra. It was discovered by Sir T. Duffus Hardy that this writing was from the school of writing Scribes and their Ways 3 7 prevalent at St. Alban's at that time, and not in- variably the autograph of the historiographer him- self. Let us now observe how a scribe would act at the beginning of his six-hour l daily task. A section of plain parchment is brought to him to be written on, each sheet still separate from the others, though loosely put in the order and form in which it will be subsequently bound. First, when the style and general size of the intended writing has been fixed, which would be a matter of custom, the largest style being reserved for psalters and other books to be used for public services on a desk or lectern, the sheets have to be ruled. Down each side of the page, holes were pricked at proper intervals with an awl, and a hard, dry, metal stilus used to draw the lines from hole to hole, with others perpendicular to mark the margins ; space was also left for illuminations when the place could be judged beforehand. The stilus made a furrow on one side of the parchment and raised a ridge on the other side, and was carried right across a sheet of parchment. This ruling was not such a simple matter as it might seem, and deserves further detail, because the regularity of the system by which it was done enables us to settle some curious points where a manuscript is partly imperfect. First, it must be noted that the two sides 1 'Ardua scriptorum proc cunctis artibus ars est : Difficilis labor cst, durus quoque flectere colla, Et membranas bis tenias sulcare per horas.' (Anon., gth cent. ?) 38 Books in Manuscript of a piece of parchment are seldom alike ; one is usually smoother and whiter (the original flesh-side), and the other rougher and yellowish (the hair-side). Now a quaternion was almost always so arranged that wherever the book was opened, the two pages presented to the eye were both hair-side or both flesh- side. Dr. Maunde Thompson lays down as a general rule that in Greek MSS. the first page of a section generally exhibited a flesh-side, and in Latin MSS. a hair-side. Secondly, although the point has not been fully investigated, at any rate in Greek MSS. of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, the first page of a quaternion usually exhibited a set of ridges, and consequently the second page a set of furrows, when ruled. Putting what has been said together (it can readily be understood from a paper model), the normal arrangement of a Greek quaternion would be and for Latin Page. Side. Ruling. Pag;. Side. Ruling. I flesh ridges I hair ridges 2-3 hair furrows 2-3 flesh furrows 4-5 flesh ridges 4-5 hair ridges 6-7 hair furrows, 6-7 flesh furrows, etc., until etc., until 16 flesh ridges 16 hair ridges. Now, observe the use of these dull facts by an example. The celebrated Codex Venetus of the Iliad of Homer has at the beginning five leaves of introductory matter of a peculiarly interesting kind, being a unique account of Homer, and an abstract Scribes and their Ways 39 (not complete) of the poems composing the Epic Cycle. It is clear from the rest of the volume, which is made up of regular quaternions, that these five leaves are the relics of an original eight forming a quaternion. The question which has agitated scholars, is the exact order in which these five leaves should be arranged. In 1881 the MS. was investigated to see if the principles of the normal arrangement of leaves with respect to hair and flesh sides, and with respect to furrows and ridges, would make impossible any of the five theories of arrangement. It was found that three of the five could be put ' out of court ' at once by these considerations, leaving the important ques- tion reduced to the comparative claims of two only a result well worth the investigation. Doubtless some puzzling questions of perturbed order in manuscripts will in time yield to the application of similar principles. The scribe has now his ruled leaves before him, his pen and ink in readiness, and the volume to be copied on a desk beside him : he may begin to tran- scribe. How simple this seems ! He is forbidden to correct, but must simply copy down letter for letter what is before him ; no responsibility, except for power of reading and for accuracy, is laid on him. Yet all who know human nature, or who have studied palaeography, will acknowledge that the probability against two consecutive leaves being really correctly transcribed is about a hundred to one. The causes of ' transcriptional error' will be treated in Chap. VI.; Books in Manuscript so that here it need only be said that the wonder is, not that there is so much cause for critical treatment of the text of an ancient author, but that there is so little. When the copyist had finished a quaternion, the writing was often compared with the original by another person ((S/o/nW???, diortlwtcs ; in Latin, cor- rector). Next, the sheets were given over to the rubricator, who inserted titles, sometimes concluding notes (called colophons), liturgical directions, lists of chapters, headlines, and the like ; and finally, if need were, to the illuminator. Nothing then remained, but that the binder's art should sew together the sections, and put them in their covering ; a few words on which may here, for completeness' sake, be added, although the subject is fully treated in another volume in this series. The common binding in the Middle Ages for books of some size and interest was leather, plain or ornamented, white or brown, fastened over solid wooden boards, with raised bands, four or five in number, across the back. The sewing of the sheets and passing of the thread over these bands usually results in a firmness and permanence which no ordinary modern book possesses : not infrequently the solid oak sides may have given way from too great rigidity under violent treatment, while the sewing remains perfectly sound. In general, how- ever, the oak sides are as permanent as the back, and the solid pegging, by which the parchment strings projecting from the thread - sewn back are Scribes and their Ways 4 1 wedged into the small square holes and grooves cut in the oak sides, is a sight worth seeing for workman- ship and indestructibility. But for appearance' sake in early mediaeval times the finest books received an ivory, silver, or even gold binding, and the sides were carved or worked into embossed figures and set with jewels ; and sometimes even wooden sides were highly ornamented. Thus the Latin Gospel of St. John, taken from the tomb of St. Cuthbert, and now at Stonyhurst, is described as bound (in the tenth or eleventh century) in boards of thin wood covered with red leather, the obverse cover containing in the centre a raised ornament of Celtic design, and above and below small panels, with interlaced work graven on them and coloured. Of the finer kind, a Latin Psalter in the British Museum, written for Melissenda, Countess of Anjou, in the twelfth century, is an example, in which the sides are of carved ivory and set with turquoises. In Ireland but rarely elsewhere we find a theca or ' cumdach/ a case in which a volume was kept; and on this, instead of the volume itself, the richest work was lavished. A few still remain, as those of the Stowe Missal and of St. Columba's Psalter, both of the eleventh century ; but the rapacity of rough times has left few of the grander bindings intact. It is pleasant to read that in the twelfth century England was before all foreign nations in binding, London, Winchester, and Dur- ham having distinctive styles, known from the de- signs stamped or traced on the leather sides, which 42 Books in Manuscript in all cases consist in the main of a parallelogram formed by small dies, filled up by circles and portions of circles in great variety. But the history of binding belongs to the subject of printed books rather than to that of manuscripts, for the great majority of bindings now valued are subsequent to the invention of printing. The cost of writing, illumination, and binding is an interesting subject, and though much material for settling the question exists, very little has as yet been brought together. In classical times, as we have seen (p. 32), a copy of the ist book of Martial's Epigrams (about 850 Latin lines of verse) cost only about 3 s. 6d. in Rome : and probably the competition of skilled scribes kept the price down to a level comparable with printed books at the present day. In the monasteries of the Middle Ages we naturally find no mention of cost of writing, as the monk's work was part of his ordinary duty, but the cost of materials and the time taken are not infrequently recorded. In the case of professional scribes employed at monas- teries, there is, of course, mention of remuneration, as at Ely in 1372, where one received 43^. ^d. with a tunic as for a year's work ; and the pay of a common scribe in 1 300 was \d. a day, equal to about J\d. of our money, while five dozen skins of parchment cost only 2s. 6d. A few examples of cost of production may be given in chronological order, Scribes and their Ways 43 About A.D. 1380, as Professor Middleton shows, John Prust, Canon of Windsor, received 75.?. 8d. for writing and illuminating a Textus Evangelii (i.e. a book of the liturgical Gospels, an Evangeliarium), some of the items being, s. d. 19 quaterni of parchment at /8, . . . 12 8 Ink, 12 Vermilion, ....... 9 Commons (the writer's meat and drink) for 18 weeks at /i o, . . . . . 15 o Stipend, 13 4 Illumination, ....... 4 3 Binding, 34 In 1453, John Reynbold agreed at Oxford to write out the last three books of Duns Scotus's Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, in quarto, for 2s. 2d. each book. A transcript in folio by this Reynbold of part of Duns Scotus on the Sentences is in both Merton and Balliol College Libraries at Oxford, one dated 1451. In 1467 the Paston Letters^ show that a writer and illuminator at Bury St. Edmund's received for producing a Psalter or other liturgical book, adding musical notes, illuminating, and binding, loos. 2d. For viij hole vynets (i.e. vignettes, small miniatures) . . . prise the vynett xija', ....... viij^ Item for xxj demi-vynets . . . prise the demi-vynett, iiijX \ijs Item for Psalmes letters xv c (1500) and di' (a half, 1550 in all) . . . the prise of c, iiij auaMS 1 rtrmm.! ^naatm tnttmmittr.fiamgmui ni piate;fitmim uanm uanmm aPtq;wop itttnmfttpmmtttTquta paoa) igrnnimfflt UteAgiiificcfflitamtntfuniu i gtftmirr^ qiuatetyitaenMM.vttiiCTruri mini animal ypm nrnfliganu. jiaetv efi que intomp gmtttmntanpUim fewtts ai fti'Rc tQ'fiUtium.qaiattea m^t^m APOCALYPSE (c. 1280, ENGLISH) Illuminations 5 7 though still formally growing out of the letter. The excessive use of blue and red, alternate or in any combination, is a general mark of this period. Lastly, when we come to the fifteenth century, the border becomes wholly detached from the initial letter, and indeed is often the work of a different hand. Now it is distinct, the border is treated separately in various ways, shortly to be described, while fruit, birds, butterflies, and flowers, drawn from nature, abound. Two specially English features of this period may be noticed as belonging to fourteenth century art : a tassel-ornament of red hair lines, with green freely used in the body ; and a border of stem and leaves, throwing off thin twisted tendrils with gold balls at end, a characteristic which lasted till the middle of the fifteenth century. With respect to the miniatures of the period, we find a general advance from form- ality to the truest study of inanimate and animate nature, ending with veritable pictures. One test of this advance is appreciation of the principles of perspective ; for not till after the beginning of the fifteenth century do we find true perspective through- out the picture. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries France is facile princcps in the art of illumination, and a few designs, found chiefly in French art, may be mentioned. In the former cen- tury a favourite background is formed by a diaper or diamond pattern of alternate colours, blue and red, or blue and gold. In the next century we find at least four general kinds of French work : 58 Books in Manuscript floriated, where flowers and birds are painted in natural arrangement ; ivy-leaf, when stems are found, thin or thick, throwing out ivy leaves of gold or other colour with some tendrils ; line and leaf, where the stem is a hair line only, but enters fully into the design as an integral part, the leaves being as in the preceding style ; and geometrical, in which the whole border is divided into pieces by symmetrical lines, each piece being separately filled up with orna- ment. German art is singularly heavy and formal, and if we judge by style, about one century behind the rest of Western Europe in development at each period. Italian is the most vigorous and marked style after French and English, and in many ways follows the lines of its schools of painting. In it until the fourteenth century borders seem hardly to be used as an artistic feature at all ; marked character- istics after A.D. 1300 are a gold spot with tendrils radiating from it, and white bands interlacing in the old Irish style. ST. MICIIAKL ( 1407, FRKXC1 CHAPTER VI. THE BLUNDERS OF SCRIBES AND THEIR CORRECTION. Textual Criticism. THE object of most of the work bestowed at the present day on manuscripts, is to restore the actual words as written by an ancient author, by the exercise of a trained intellect on the more or less faulty materials which have survived to the present time. When we consider how liable a copyist is to errors of transcription, and how, when once an error has been made and has escaped correc- tion, it cannot but be repeated by the next copyist, who also introduces his own new ones, and that in the course of centuries this process of deterioration can only be accelerated, we cease to wonder at the importance and honour accorded to Textual Criti- cism, the system by which the sources of error are classified, and an attempt is made to reverse the course of depravation and undo the accumulated perversions of many generations. The textual critic then keeps chiefly before him the mind and the hand, of the scribe, to which alone can be due variations from the original authentic 59 60 Books in Manuscript text ; and in this spirit considers the manuscripts of his author to which he has access, trying to separate them into classes, according to the peculiarities which they display. He may prove that several of them point back to a single older manuscript, from which they were all derived, and which in relation to these later copies is called their archetype. By this con- clusion he has mounted one. step nearer to the author's original text ; and if he can discern several archetypes of existing groups of MSS., he may com- pare even these phantom archetypal MSS., and so penetrate farther and farther into the mist of ages. This is the principle of Genealogy, and may be illustrated by two simple examples, (i) The Dis- courses of Arrian, based on the teaching of his master Epictetus, called the A/ar/j;,3a/ 'Er/zr?jr&y, were written in the second century after Christ, and exhibit the highest point which Stoic philosophy ever reached. But no MS. of them exists which is older than the twelfth century. In one book of the Discourses there is a passage of which all the printed editions and all the MSS. make a hash ; some omit the passage, some print words which make no sense, and some indicate by blanks that they cannot deal with the difficult)'. But in one MS. alone, the oldest, there is at this very passage a curious oval smear in the middle of the page, which on investigation accounts for all the vagaries of other MSS. and editions. We cannot possibly doubt that this MS. is the archetype of all other existing copies of the Blunders of Scribes and their Correction 6 1 Discourses. It is seldom, however, that so clear and decisive a proof can be found. (2) In a MS. of mediaeval letters there is one which begins, 'Frater y. pauperum Christi ' (brother yE[thelredus], one of the poor of Christ). This is quite straightforward ; but in one MS. nearly contemporary with the writer himself, the letter begins, ' Frater de pauperum Christi,' which cannot be translated. A comparison of several MSS. shows that the de is a mistake by an ignorant scribe, who mistook a peculiar form of JE, for de. Now, whenever a MS. is found with de, we may feel pretty sure that such a stupid blunder would not twice be made, and that any second later occurrence of the word is due to a copyist who had the first blunderer's own copy before him, and was unable or (we may hope) unwilling to attempt to restore the text by any conjecture of his own. But when errors are not so easily traced, as in this last example, the textual critic is allowed to consider, not only the mind and the hand of the scribe, but also (and, so to speak, on his own respon- sibility) the mind of the author also. It is, however, a very slippery matter when one argues from general style, or from similar passages found elsewhere in the work, that the author must have written such and such words ; and the tendency of modern criticism is to confine the use of parallel passages to illustra- tion or corroboration, and to deprecate that attractive exercise of ingenuity which suggests readings not found in any existing manuscript (' Conjectural 62 Books in Manuscript Emendation'), except within narrow limits, such as when a great author is only preserved to us in a few manuscripts (perhaps one only), as is the case with Catullus and part of the Annals of Tacitus. It is a very singular fact that instead of the cor- ruptions and variations increasing in number in proportion to the distance of MSS. from the author's time, that number after a time seems not merely not to increase, but actually to diminish ; partly from the correction of blunders by intelligent scribes, partly from what is called ' mixture ' of MSS., one copy being used to correct and remove the faults of another, so that eccentricities of a single copyist are gradually eliminated by his successors in the art of transcription. We will now give a classification of sources of error in transcription, and a list of the chief principles on which these errors are corrected. I. SOURCES OF ERROR IN TRANSCRIPTION. A. UNCONSCIOUS. I. Errors of sight or hearing. These occur when the eye of the scribe (or, in the less usual case of dictation, the ear) fails to grasp correctly what has to be copied. A common error is for a whole line of the MS. which is being copied to drop out ; and usually the cause of it is that two lines end with the same word or termination, and the scribe's eye has slipped over to the second one. Blunders of Scribes and their Correction 63 Suppose part of the Lord's Prayer written in old style, with no stops or capitals, thus : bethynamethy kingdomcomethy willbedonein, a copyist might easily omit altogether the second line, because of the Homoioteleuton, as it is called, which might cause the eye to slip from the first thy to the second. Probably no Greek MS. of the New Testament is free from an example of this. 2. Errors of memory. These occur when, in the interval between seeing and writing, some uncon- scious cerebration takes place in the copyist's head, and he puts down something wrong. Parallel pass- ages are a very common source of mistake, when the copyist remembers another set of words similar, but not identical, with that before him, and blunders. Thus, in Virgil's sn. vii. 324, the copyist of an early MS. probably had ab sede dearum before him, but was misled by a recollection of ALH. vii. 454 (where MSS. do not differ) to put down ab sede sororum, which is now found in many MSS., and almost no editions. The point is, that it is so unlikely that a copyist would introduce dearum out of his own head, whereas he might easily introduce sororum wrongly, if he was well acquainted with his Virgil. 3. Errors of intellect. In Latin, the contraction mr stands for both mater and martyr, and mta stands for both miseria and misericordia. It might easily 64 Books in Manuscript happen that a copyist would unconsciously expand the contraction wrongly. B. CONSCIOUS. i. Incorporation of marginal glosses or various readings. Often when a word or passage is difficult, it is glossed ; that is to say, some- thing is written just over it, or in the margin, to make it clearer. In Shakespeare's time the word ' owe ' had a meaning to ' own ' ; we can therefore imagine a copy of Shakespeare in which ' to him that owes it ' might be glossed by ' own.' Some later copyist, say a foreigner, could easily be conceived as writing, ' to him that owes owns it,' thus incorpor- ating the gloss, because he did not understand it, and thought it to bean addition accidentally omitted, and by all means to be inserted. So, in old days, when one MS. was compared with another, it was a custom to write a variation on the margin of one of the two, and this might be similarly incorporated. 2. Correction of apparent difficulties, such as unusual forms and expressions, seeming contradictions, or incomplete quotations. Unfortunately, the tendency to make a text read well by removing difficulties, led scribes in uncritical times to substitute, with no deliberate desire to mislead, easy words for archaic, and plain for obscure. 3. Deliberate falsification, such as a charge of text for dogmatic reasons. In ordinary MSS., even where there might be temptation, this fault is extremely rare ; but a curious example may probably be found, in Virgil, see p. 69. Blunders of Scribes and their Correction 65 II. PRINCIPLES ON WHICH TRANSCRIPTION AL ERRORS ARE CORRECTED. In the following list the principle is in italics, followed by a brief explanation, if necessary, and references (i) to the foregoing sources of error, and (2) to passages in Virgil which may be taken as examples, if recourse be had to a critical edition such as Conington's ; but it must be clearly understood that the passages are only adduced to show how a single principle operates in practice, and it is not suggested that that single principle in each case leads to the best text, since it is often overborne by still weightier considerations of another kind. I. A short reading is to be preferred to one more verbose. This is due to the tendency of scribes to incorporate glosses, to expand hard phrases by easier ones which are often longer, and often to a conscien- tious desire to put into the text all there is in the MS. copied, whether glosses or various readings or corrections (B. i, B. 2). ;En. ii. 778 : ( hinc comitem asportare \ Nee te < comitem hinc asportare > Crelisam | Fas. ( comitem asportare (Nor is it right for you to bear hence with you Creiisa. ) Here the hinc, which is found both before and after comitem, and is in some MSS. omitted, excites sus- picion that it is a gloss which has crept into the text ; and when we see how apposite as a gloss the word E 66 Books in Manuscript would be (to show that asportare, ' to carry off,' is quite distinct from apportare, ' to carry to '), our suspicion is increased. In fact, we can hardly doubt that the third line above is the right text, and that the shorter reading is to be preferred. But how soon the hinc found its way into the text may be judged from the fact that Servius, the early commentator on Virgil, declares that the common reading in his time (the fifth century ?) could not be scanned ; so clearly his text was No. 2 in the parallel readings at the head of this note. Another example of this principle will be found in sn. vii. 464, 465. 2. A difficult or obscure reading is better than one zuhick is, from the point of view of the copyist, fuller and easier (B. 2). sEn. xi. 708 : ( fraudem. lam nosces, ventosa ferat cui gloria < laudem. ( pcenam. (Quickly you shall know to which side wind-blown fame will bring defeat. ) This is a good example of a difficult reading (difficult to the mind of the scribe) being preferable. Fraus, which seems at first sight impossible to trans- late, since there is no idea of deceit in the passage, had in early Latin the sense of injury, and here means harm, defeat. But copyists who did not know this old meaning substituted laudem, 'victory,' and some who did know it glossed it by pcenam, which subsequent copyists took, not as a gloss, but as a Blunders of Scribes and their Correction 67 better reading. Obviously we should prefer fraudem. <&n. i. 636 is in some points a similar case. 3. A less emphatic reading is nearer to the original text. No author is always at his best, and few writings cannot be improved by persons far inferior to the writer. The common quotation, Sic volo, sic jubeo : stet pro ratione voluntas, a forcible line, ought to be given in the weaker but more correct form, Hoc volo, sic jubeo : sit . . . (Juvenal : B. 2). sEn. vi. 664 : Quique sui memores j aic l u s f fecere merendo. (alios 3 (And who by their good deeds made some to remember them.) Aliquos is undoubtedly weak ; so weak that Con- ington declares alios (others) to be ' infinitely pre- ferable,' since it introduces some little antithesis between 'themselves' and 'others.' But aliquos has decidedly the better testimony, and Virgil probably let a careless line escape him. 4. Readings which owe their origin to simple care- lessness on the part of the scribe are rightly rejected (A. 1-3). ALn t ix. 657 : Apollo I Mortales medio \ \ sermone relinquit. (aspectusj (Apollo vanishes from mortal sight before his words are ended.) The extraordinary circumstance about this line is that rt//the leading MSS. (three uncials and the chief cursive) read aspectu, which makes nonsense of the passage (' Apollo leaves mortals, while looking at 68 Books in Manuscript them, with a remark ! '). In fact, a reading which has by far the best support is entirely given up by editors, because due to copyists' carelessness. The excuse for its existence at all is, of course, that medio precedes, and a word beginning with s follows, so that MEDIOASPECTUSSERMONE was, as it were, a trap for the inattentive. 5. Out of several readings, that one is best which lies, as it were, midmost among the others. It is very instructive, when a passage is beset with variations in the MSS., to attempt to reconstruct the Scala Viti- orum, and make a probable genealogy of the readings, whether blunders or corrections. The one which will best account for all the others, and with which the others can be most easily causally connected, is probably the right one (A. and B.). . ix. 632-4: ' Sagitta | ... venit et cava tempera ferro Transigit. " I, Transadigit. Traicit. "I, V verbis virtutem illude superbis."' Transiit. " I, Traiecit. (The arrow flies and pierces the hollow temples [of Remulus] with iron barb. ' Go to, now mock my valour with thy vaunts.') The first four readings above are those of the three uncials and the chief cursive MS. which con- tain the passage. The fifth is the corrected reading of the same cursive, and is found also in inferior MSS. Now, what is the pedigree of corruption, and which the form from which the error first Blunders of Scribes and their Correction 69 sprang ? The ' I ' would naturally cause some con- fusion (TRAICITIVERBIS), and also the form traicio instead of the longer trans-icio. The probable genealogy would seem on the whole to be one which selects traicit i as the ' midmost ' reading from which the rest have most naturally sprung : traicit. I transigit. I traiecit transadigit transiit. I But there must have been considerable variation even before our existing MSS. were written. 6. Omissions may be suspected when tJie passages wanting are repugnant to natural feeling or orthodox dogma (B. 3). jEn. ii. 567-588. This is a well-known passage, in which the hero of the jEneid discusses with himself whether he shall slay Helen in cold blood. The omission of the passage, whether by Tucca and Varius (see p. 70) or in some very early MS., is an argument for their genuineness, when we consider how shocking the idea must have seemed even to Roman minds. Most editors enclose them in brackets as doubtful. We may conclude this chapter with two specimens of the literary history of famous books, selected because the amount of testimony to them, both in the number 7O Books in Manuscript and importance of their MSS., is greater than of any other ancient authors whatever Virgil and the Four Gospels. i. Virgil (Publitts Vergilius Maro). It is recorded of Virgil, as of Tennyson, that he wrote much more than he published, and that he was occupied for much of his time in cutting down and reducing to their best form passages thrown off in the heat of composition. Even at the end of his life he was so diffident of the merits of the jZLneid that he wished to burn it. It appears to be certain that Virgil himself wrote out his poems in their best form ; for Aulus Gellius, in the second century of our era, distinctly records that he saw the autograph original manuscript of the Georgics. After Virgil's death, in B.C. 19, Tucca and Varius published, according to their discretion, the jEneid ; and even at this time may have removed from the text the lines in the second book (567-588), in which the hero of the work expresses his deliberate desire to put Helen to death. Servius preserves the lines, and they occur in the text of only a few late MSS. Publication would, of course, mean that scribes were allowed to copy the autograph of Virgil, and that these transcripts were themselves copied, and the process continued till the invention of printing. Our oldest existing MSS. of the ALneid are the following : The Palatine (P), in the Vatican at Rome, of the third or fourth century ; the Vatican (R = Romanus), perhaps of the same date, Blunders of Scribes and their Correction 7 1 and adorned with nineteen remarkable pictures illu- minated in a classical style ; the Medicean (known as M), in the Laurentian Library at Florence, of the fifth century ; and three sets of fragments, in the Vatican (F, perhaps of the third century, still containing no less than fifty miniatures of the greatest interest and value), at St. Gall (G), and at Verona (V, a palim- psest 1 ). All these are in capitals, chiefly rustic capitals, and are followed by a host of minuscule MSS., from the ninth century onwards, which have never been enumerated at length, but must amount to two or three hundred at least. 2. The Four Gospels. It is generally agreed that after the death of Christ the history of His life and doctrine was carried on by oral tradition only, with no written record. But as soon as persecution began to disperse the Chris- tians, it would be inevitable that for fear of un- conscious distortion, or even of simple forgetfulness of the facts, some record would be made which could be put in the hands of disciples departing to distant lands ; it was the only possible way of pre- 1 A palimpsest (from va,x'iu.$nffrt>s, palimpsestos, scraped again) is a MS. from which the old writing has been as far as possible scraped to allow of the parchment being again used for later writing. In the British Museum (MS. Add. 17,212) is a rare example of a double palimpsest. Lowest is an uncial MS. of the 5th cent., containing a fragment of the Annales of C. Granius Licinianus ; next, a gram- matical Latin treatise, in cursive minuscule ; and on the top a Syriac translation of Chrysostom's Homilies, itself not later than the ninth or tenth century ! 72 Books in Manuscript venting hopeless disagreement, or utterly incomplete exposition of their common doctrine. In this way, no doubt, originated the four histories now known as the Gospels. The earliest testimony we have to the text is contained in the writings of the early Fathers, where they quote passages from, or otherwise de- scribe, the history of Christ ; and it is in accordance with the course of events described above that we find in the earliest notices a real but not a verbal agreement with our present text. Soon, however, the agreement becomes close, and we can see that the reference is to written standard accounts. The next earliest class of witness to the text is, strange to say, that of versions or translations. There is direct evidence, for instance, of both a Latin and a Syriac version of the Gospels in the second century ; of an Egyptian, two forms of which are quite possibly also of the second century ; a Gothic, by Bishop Ulfilas, certainly of the fourth century ; and /Ethiopic and Armenian versions before A.D. 600. Lastly, we come to the age of our existing MSS. of the Greek Text. Two are ascribed to the fourth century ; one, the Codex Sinaiticus (known as K), the romantic discovery of which is related on p. 96, a MS. of the whole Bible in Greek, now imperfect, but still containing the whole of the New Testament, written (and it is unique in this respect) with four columns on a page ; the other, the Codex Vaticanus (B), also when perfect a MS. of the whole Bible, written in three columns, one of the chief treasures Blunders of Scribes and their Correction 73 of the Vatican at Rome. Next in point of age ranks the Codex Alexandrinus (A), probably written in the fifth century, a complete Bible, presented by Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople, to Charles I. in 1628, he having obtained it from Alexandria, of which he had been Patriarch, and where it had rested for many centuries. George II. placed it in the British Museum, with his library, in 1757, and it has ever since been its chief manuscript treasure. To the fifth century also belongs the Codex rescriptus Ephraemi (C), in the National Library at Paris, once a Bible, now a collection of fragments containing about two- thirds of its original contents. It is a palimpsest, the ancient writing, after being scraped, bearing above it some Greek works of Ephrem Syrus, written in the twelfth century. Codex Bezce (D), containing the Gospels and Acts (nearly complete), and originally the Catholic Epistles, in Greek and Latin, is the glory of the Cambridge University Library, and is generally ascribed to the sixth century. It was presented to the University in 1581 by Theodorus Beza, who obtained it from the monastery of St. Irenaeus at Lyons, after it was sacked in 1562. It is celebrated for the extraordinary variations from and additions to the received text. All the five above-mentioned MSS. are written on fine vellum, in quarto form, with uncial letters. In all, there are twenty-one uncial Greek MSS. of the Gospels, or, counting fragments, sixty-six, each of which is known among scholars by a capital letter, 74 Books in Manuscript or, in the case of fragments, by a capital letter together with a small letter : the majority belong to the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. This list is succeeded by a multitude of later MSS. in minuscule writing, the number of which, for the Gospels alone, is at least 1 300, ranging from the ninth to the seventeenth century. The number of witnesses to the text of Virgil and the Four Gospels is so great, that conjectural emen- dation is, in fact, not allowable for either book. And this superabundance has also its use when we have to consider less fortunate authors like Lucan or Pro- pertius; for we are able, by surveying the body of New Testament MSS., to estimate fairly the relation of late to early copies in point of accuracy and general worth, and to confirm our general confidence in a text even when no early testimony to it has survived. CHAPTER VII. FAMOUS LIBRARIES. OF the libraries of ancient times very little is cer- tainly known. Statements like that of Strabo, that Aristotle was the first collector of a library, add nothing to our knowledge, until we know more of the exact sense in which the words are used, and of the extent of what is here called a 'library'; while the library of clay tablets found at Nineveh, perhaps dating from the seventh century B.C., out of which some 20,000 are now in the British Museum, hardly comes under a description of manuscripts. The one great bibliothecarial fact of antiquity is the Library of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy Soter (about B.C. 300), and the earliest recorded librarian of it was Zenodotus of Ephesus (about B.C. 280). The lowest computation of its size is 100,000 rolls. But of the three or four separate libraries at Alexandria under the Ptolemys, we cannot tell which were burnt in the time of Julius Caesar and which survived till their destruction in or before the fourth century of the Christian era. One thing is certain, that if the Caliph Omar in A.D. 638 burnt any books in Alex- andria (with the well - known decision that if the 76 Books in Manuscript books in it were unorthodox they were pernicious, and if orthodox, they must be superfluous), he did not burn the ancient and famous library, for that had perished long before his time. In Italy, we read of extensive private libraries of Varro, Atticus, and others ; but the only one about which we are on sure ground is that found in the last century at Hercu- laneum, after being overwhelmed by the Vesuvian eruption of A.D. 79, of which at least 350 rolls have been recovered by excavation, and are, for the most part, preserved at Naples (see p. 95). As literature was never a prominent feature in early monastic life, except in Ireland, so the library of a religious house was, till late in mediaeval times, a subordinate part of the buildings. As has been already mentioned, it is in the great houses of the Benedictine Order that we find the largest libraries, such as in England at Bury St. Edmund's, Glaston- bury, Peterborough, Reading, St. Alban's, and, above all, that of Christ Church in Canterbury, probably the earliest library formed in England. Among the other English monasteries of the libraries of which we still possess catalogues or other details, are St. Peter's at York, described in the eighth century by Alcuin, St. Cuthbert's at Durham, and St. Augus- tine's at Canterbury. At the dissolution of the monasteries their libraries were dispersed, and the basis of the great modern libraries is the volumes thus scattered over England. In general, the volumes were disposed much as Famous Libraries 77 now, that is to say, upright, and in large cases affixed to a wall, often with doors. The larger volumes at least were in many cases chained, so that they could only be used within about six feet of their proper place ; and since the chain was always riveted on the fore-edge of one of the sides of a book, the back of the volume had to be thrust first into the shelf, leaving the front edge of the leaves exposed to view. Many old volumes bear a mark in ink on this front edge ; and when this is the case, we may be sure that it was once chained in a library ; and usually a little further investigation will disclose the mark of a rivet on one of the sides. Regulations were carefully made to prevent the mixture of different kinds of books, and their overcrowding or inconvenient posi- tion ; while an organised system of lending was in vogue, by which at least once a year, and less formally at shorter intervals, the monks could change or renew the volumes already on loan. Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham in the fourteenth century, when framing rules for the library of a hall at Oxford to which he intended to leave his manu- scripts, insisted that only ' duplicates ' should be lent to students outside the hall, and then only after a ' caution ' or pledge had been deposited which ex- ceeded the volume in value, and after a memorandum had been made of the circumstances. But to students of the hall his books were to be lent freely, on condition that they were exhibited yearly to the custodians of his library. 78 Books in Manuscript Let us take an example of the arrangement of a monastic library of no special distinction in A.D. 1400, that at Titchfield Abbey, describing it in the words of the register of the monastery itself, only translating the Latin into English. ' The arrange- ment of the library of the monastery of Tychefeld is this : There are in the library of Tychefeld four cases (colnmnce) in which to place books, of which two, the first and second, are on the eastern face ; on the southern face is the third, and on the northern face the fourth. And each of them has eight shelves (gradus), marked with a letter and number affixed on the front of each shelf, that is to say, on the lower board of each of the aforesaid shelves ; certain letters, however, are excepted, namely A, H, K, L, M, O, P, Q, which have no numbers affixed, because all the volumes to which one of those letters belongs are contained in the shelf to which that letter is assigned. 1 So all and singular the volumes of the said library are fully marked on the first leaf and elsewhere on the shelf belonging to the book, with certain numbered letters. And in order that what is in the library may be more quickly found, the marking of the shelves of the said 1 That is, the shelves with the letters A, H, K, etc., have a complete class of books in each, and in no case does that class overflow into a second shelf, so there was no need of marking these shelves with numbers as well as letters, in the way in which the rest were marked. Thus we should find ' B i,' ' B 2,' ' B 3,' . . . 'B 7,' because B filled seven shelves ; but ' A ' only, because A filled one shelf alone. Famous Libraries 79 library, the inscriptions in the books, and the refer- ences in the register, in all points agree with each other. Anno Domini MCCCC.' ' The order in which the books of the monastery of Tychefeld lie in the library of the said monastery.' [ist Case, ist shelf (A), Theology, 4 Bibles; 2nd-6th shelves (B), 18 Bibles with commentary; 7th-8th shelves (B), 7 comm. on Psalms. 2nd Case, ist shelf (C), 7 comm. on Bible ; 2nd (C), 3 comm. on Bible and Isidorus ; 3rd (C), 6 theological volumes ; 4th~5th (D), 6 vols. of Gregory ; 6th (D), 2 theological vols. ; 7th-Sth (D), 4 Augustines. 3rd Case, ist-2nd shelves (E), 1 1 Lives of Saints and Sermons ; 3rd-4th (F), ii vols. of Canon Law; 5th-7th (G), 21 vols. of comm. on Canon Law ; 8th (H), 7 vols. of Civil Laiv. 4th Case, ist shelf (K), 29 vols. of Medicine; 2nd~3rd (L-M), Arts, 8 and 16 vols. of Grammar ; 4th-5th (N), 20 miscellaneous vols.; 6th (O), 8 and 5 vols. of Logic and Philosophy; 7th (P), 13 vols. of English Law; 8th (Q), 18 French volumes. After these followed 1 02 liturgical volumes.] Titchfield Abbey was a Praemonstratensian house, founded in the thirteenth century, and never specially rich or prominent ; yet we find it with a good library of sixty-eight books in theology, thirty-nine in Canon and Civil Law, twenty-nine in Medicine, thirty-seven in Arts, and in all three hundred and twenty-six volumes, many containing several treatises, so that the total number of works was considerably over a thousand. 8o Books in Manuscript We have only space here to deal in any detail with a few of the famous libraries of Great Britain, and (more summarily) of the Continent, describing their gradual building up, whether by donations or pur- chase of manuscripts. Mr. Elton has already described (in his volume on Book-Collectors in this series) some of the chief private libraries of manuscripts ; the present chapter will deal rather with the ultimate resting-places of those private collections, in cases where they have fortunately escaped dispersal by sale or through neglect. I. The British Museum. Among English-speaking peoples the library of the British Museum stands without a rival, whether we regard the size or the importance of its printed and manuscript treasures. It is the National Library, the central collection of the literature of the British Empire, while it claims also to have the largest collec- tion of the literature of every foreign country which exists outside that country. In the extent of its printed books it yields only to the National Library at Paris, and in the value of its MSS. only to the same library and to the Vatican. Its foundation was comparatively late, but united four private collections of great extent. First and foremost is the Old Royal Library of the Kings of England, which had grown to importance more by small and gradual accretions than by deliberate pur- chase on a large scale. Even Queen Elizabeth added Famous Libraries 81 little to it ; and not till, under James I., the Earl of Arundel's MSS. were added to it, can it be said to have received at any one time an important enlarge- ment. Under Whitelock's care it survived the Civil War ; but when Dr. Richard Bentley became keeper in 1694, it was still lodged in a mean room at St. James's Palace. Even when transferred to the British Museum in 1757, the MSS. only numbered 1800, but comprised such volumes as the Alexandrine Codex of the New Testament, and many royal pos- sessions of special interest and value. The second collection was the celebrated Cottonian Library, the work of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton's lifetime. After his death in 1631, his son and grandson, Sir Thomas and Sir John Cotton, augmented it, and in A.D. 1700 it was vested by the latter for public purposes in the hands of trustees. On Saturday, October 23, 1731, when the library was at Ashburnham House in West- minster, a terrible fire broke out, and damaged most seriously over a hundred of the 958 MSS. of the collection, and less seriously injured a hundred more. Since then everything possible has been done to restore the shrivelled and blackened leaves. The fourteen original cases at Ashburnham House were sur- mounted by busts of the twelve Caesars, with Cleo- patra and Faustina, and the shelf-marks still bear their name the type of reference being MS. Cotton Caligula, D. vi., or the like. The chartularies of English abbeys, English historical deeds, and an immense series of English State papers are among F 82 Books in Manuscript the chief features of the library. Third in rank, but by far the most numerous, is the Harleian Collec- tion, comprising nearly 8coo volumes, besides more than 14,000 charters and rolls. It was the result of the labours of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford (d. 1724), and Edward, his son, to amass volumes illustrating English history ; but theology and general literature are almost equally well represented. Parlia- ment purchased it for ; 10,000, and in 1753 it was transferred to the Museum. Smaller in size, but more really the nucleus of the Museum, is the library and museum of Sir Hans Sloane. The MSS. number 4100, and are chiefly scientific, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ; but the curiosities are the foundation of the Natural History Departments, and the provident mind of Sir Hans Sloane had already sketched out a scheme by which his collections, valued by himself at ^"80,000, should be preserved for public use and entrusted to a body of trustees. After his death in 1752, the Act was passed (26 Geo. II. cap. 22, 1753) which established the British Museum, by purchasing Montagu House in Blooms- bury, Sir Hans Sloane's collections (for .20,000), and the Harleian Library, and for providing that the Cottonian Library should be transferred to the same place. The Old Royal Library was joined to these in 1757. No large collection of MSS. was added to these four corner-stones of the National Library until 1 807, when the Lansdoivne collection (of State papers Famoiis Libraries 83 and other material for English history) was pur- chased, soon followed in 1813 by the legal MSS. of Francis Hargrave, and in 1818 by the classical and other MSS. of Dr. Charles Burney. The library collected by George III., which narrowly escaped a transfer to Russia, but ultimately became the pro- perty of the Museum in 1829, contained 440 manu- scripts, chiefly bearing on the relations of England to France, and on the art of war. With the purchase in 1831, from the Royal Society, of the MSS. of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, which had been received by the Society in 1667, and were quite miscellaneous in character, the second group of accessions was complete. Soon after this, immense progress was made in the printed depart- ment under Panizzi, and the whole Museum became more worthy of the nation. The Syriac collections, brought from the Nitrian desert in 1841-49, were the foundation of the Oriental MSS. ; but the later acces- sions en bloc have been perhaps less striking in the MS. department than in the other parts of the library, while the smaller or single purchases have been often of great value. In 1883, however, a precious collection of about 1000 Stowe MSS., forming part of the Ashburnham Library, were acquired ; and in it not only many volumes of English topography, genealogy, and political correspondence, but also Anglo-Saxon charters of great interest. 84 Books in Manuscript 2. Bodleian Library. Next in importance among the libraries of the British Empire, is the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Its founder, Sir Thomas Bodley, was a worthy of Devon, who had been actively employed by Queen Elizabeth as a diplomatist, and had returned tired of court life to the University, where long before he had been Fellow of Merton College. He found the ancient library of the University (which, after growing slowly with many vicissitudes from small beginnings, had suddenly been enriched in 1439-46 by a gift of 264 valuable MSS. from Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester) utterly destroyed by Edward VI.'s Commissioners, and the room built for its reception (still called ' Duke Humphrey's library ') swept clear even of the readers' desks. His deter- mination to refound the library of the University was actively carried out, and on November 8, 1602, the new institution was formally opened with about 2000 printed and manuscript volumes. Two striking advantages were possessed by the Bodleian almost from the first. Sir Thomas Bodley employed his great influence at court and with friends to induce them to give help to his scheme, and accordingly we find not only donations of money and books from personal friends, but 240 MSS. contributed by the Deans and Chapters of Exeter and Windsor. More- over, in 1610 he arranged with the Stationers' Com- pany that they should present his foundation with Fajnoiis Libraries 85 a copy of every printed book published by a member of the Company ; and from that time to this the right to every book published in the kingdom has been continuously enjoyed. Before the Civil War the chief accessions were the Barocci Greek MSS. from the Earl of Pembroke (1629); Sir Kenelm Digby's collection (1638) ; and Archbishop Laud's large and valuable library of Oriental, classical, and English volumes (1635-40), in all about 1300 MSS. At this time Oxford was almost the only place where collectors could place their treasures in safety ; and fortunately so little did politics enter into the affairs of the library, that both Fairfax and Cromwell not only spared the place in the Civil War, but gave the MSS. still known by their names, and the former also the Dodsworth Collection. The other chief accessions of the seventeenth century were from Selden (1656) and the two Oriental scholars Pococke and Huntington. In the first half of the eighteenth century no large donation was received, but at last, in 1/55, soon after the Carte Papers (relating to Irish and English history), Dr. Richard Rawlinson's will brought in upwards of 7000 MSS. quite miscellaneous in subject, but including all Hearne's possessions, and teeming with the spoils of the manuscript sales of the previous half-century. The Clarendon State Papers followed in 1759, but no other large collec- tion until we reach the two great donations and the two great purchases of the present century the Gough and Douce Libraries, and the Oppenheimer 86 Books in Manuscript and Canonici. The first (1809) was topographical, the next (1834) contributed nearly all the finest illu- minations possessed by the Bodleian. The general collection of the Venetian Jesuit Canonici came in 1817, and the Hebrew MSS. of Oppenheimer in 1829. Several Oriental collections followed, Bruce's (Arabic and Ethiopic) in 1843, and Ouseley's (Persian) in 1844. By transference from the Ashmolean Museum, which was from the first rather a museum of natural history than a library, the Bodleian received in 1858 the valuable Ashmole and Anthony Wood Collections ; and the former full of heraldic lore and genealogical matter, the latter of Oxford antiquities. Since then the increase has been by less important and smaller donations and purchases. 3. Cambridge University Library. The University Library at Cambridge is by far the most ancient of all the more public collections in the kingdom. There are books there which have been continuously on the shelves since the first quarter of the fifteenth century, having been presented in 1424. A great landmark in the history of the library is an inventory of the books (all at that time in manu- script) taken in 1473, which exhibits the old arrange- ment as in a monastic library, with its five classes or compartments devoted to Theology, three to Canon Law, one each to Civil Law, Moral Philosophy, Natural Philosophy, and Medicine, and one shared by Logic and Grammar. In 1715, the library received Famous Libraries 87 its one great augmentation 'in the library of John Moore, Bishop of Ely, purchased and presented by King George I. ; but it is remarkable that Cambridge has induced so few great collectors, even among its own alumni, to give their books a home there. This was no doubt largely due to a sense of insecurity, the result of the very great facilities at one time given to such as wished to borrow ; for even MSS. were lent out on ordinary lending tickets, and great injury and loss at different times resulted. The Library of Trinity College, Dublin, had a curious origin, being a thank -offering on the part of the army which won the battle of Kinsale against Irish insurgents and their Spanish allies in 1601. But the foundation of its greatness was largely due to the fact that, after many vicissitudes both before and after its possessor's death in 1656, Archbishop Ussher's library, including nearly 700 valuable MSS., found its resting-place there. It possesses some of the grandest monuments of early Irish art, in the Book of Kells, the Book of Durrow, and similar volumes. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge (especially the older ones, and particularly Balliol, Christ Church, and Queen's at Oxford, and Trinity and Corpus Christi at Cambridge, the last-named possessing a splendid collection left to it by Archbishop Parker) contain MSS. of value, and most of the cathedrals 88 Books in Manuscript have small collections ; while the Lambeth Library in London, the Chetham in Manchester, and in Scotland the Advocates', would deserve special mention in a larger work than the present. Among private libraries in the United Kingdom, one overshadows the rest by its astonishing size the Phillipps Collection, now at Thirlestane House, Cheltenham. It is hardly credible that the number of MSS. is over 30,000. Sir Thomas Phillipps of Middlehill, in Worcestershire, amassed this number by fairly sweeping the London market during the period from 1823 to about 1870. At first he was careful to reject all unimportant volumes, but in later life he became less fastidious. The only parallel to Sir Thomas Phillipps' effect on the London market is the curious condition attached to Dr. Mason's bequest to Queen's College, Oxford, in 1841 : that ^"30,000 should be spent on MSS. and rare printed books within ten years ! The Phillipps MSS. chiefly illustrate English history ; but more than 350 are Greek, while Latin classics and the Fathers are well represented ; and there is an immense body of docu- ments relating to France, Italy, and Spain. Unfor- tunately, this great collection is in danger of entire disintegration, parts having already been sold to the German and Netherland Governments. The number of papers, letters, and volumes of public interest and value discovered by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and described in their reports, has surprised persons who believed our Famous Libraries 89 public libraries to contain almost all that was of value in England ; and no mention of private libraries can omit the name of the Duke of Devonshire (owner of the Benedictional of ^Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester in 963-984, written by Abbot Godeman, and illuminated with scenes from the life of Christ and figures of saints in such profusion and artistic taste that it is probably the finest MS. existing in private hands), or the astonishing treasures brought together for sale by Mr. Bernard Quaritch. The chief foreign libraries can only be summarily enumerated. The National Library at Paris is the finest in the world, whether we regard its regal history, its present size, or the value of its contents. It has grown since the fourteenth century out of the collections of the French kings, and owes much to the pride with which not only France, but the ambassadors of France in foreign countries, have regarded it, as well as to the distinguished librarians who have fostered it, from De Thou and Colbert to M. Leopold Delisle. Vast accessions were obtained from the French religious houses suppressed at the Revolution, although it is said that at that time some 25,000 MSS. were burnt. Next ranks the Vatican at Rome, not for size, but for the intrinsic importance of its manuscript con- tents. The jealous care of the Popes from Nicholas V. in the fifteenth century, and their great opportunities for acquiring theological treasures, have been the sources of its security and increase. The Ambrosian go Books in Manuscript Library at Milan, the Laurentian at Florence, with that of St. Mark, complete the list of important Italian collections. In Austria the great storehouse of MSS. is the Imperial Library at Vienna ; in the German Empire, the Libraries of Berlin and Munich ; in Hol- land, that of the Hague ; in Belgium, the Royal Library of Brussels ; in Russia, the Imperial Library of St. Petersburg ; and in Spain, the Royal Library of Madrid and the Escurial. Even a cursory survey of these great libraries and collections of MSS. suggests reflexions on principles of ownership. How does a library acquire absolute right over volumes which have once been in other repositories ? When a man like Libri, the great French book thief of this century (who visited officially certain provincial libraries and stole MSS. therefrom, sometimes taking the trouble to substitute sham volumes bound like the originals), sells his books to public libraries, have they full ownership at once in point of law ? Sir Robert Cotton once lent a cele- brated eighth century Psalter out of his library (eventually the Cottonian Collection in the British Museum), and passing from hand to hand it was given at last by a M. de Ridder in 1718 to the Utrecht Library, and is now known as the Utrecht Psalter. Is there any possibility of its restitution ? Henry Bradshaw recognised a valuable printed Sarum Breviary of 1483 in the National Library at Paris as stolen from the Cambridge University Library since Famous Libraries 91 1715, and purchased in 1825 by the authorities of the National Library at Paris ; what rights exist to reclaim the book ? It would appear that the right to a book rests on more than one consideration, certainly not simply on the fact of justifiable acquisition, though after a considerable time that fact begins to have weight. Clearly when a lawful authority has authorised the dispersal of a collection, full ownership can be at once acquired. But failing this, the questions naturally asked are, Did the MS. come to its owners from a pure source, that is to say, from a seller of known good character, so that there is no suspicion of his being a conscious receiver of stolen goods ? and, Does the MS. now rest in a good and fit repository, so that no substantial injustice is done to the republic of letters? If these two questions are affirmatively answered, probably no court of law would compel restitution. It has, however, been decided that in the case of parish registers, no bookseller can acquire or impart any rights of ownership, and that when found they are liable to be claimed by the authorities of the place to which they belong. But even in this case the lapse of time would have weight, if it exceeded say half a century. The facilities given by the British Government for the restoration of Libri volumes to France in 1883 form an interesting chapter in the history of international courtesy, but hardly touch the legal aspect of the question. CHAPTER VIII. FAMOUS MANUSCRIPTS. IN the present chapter, short descriptions will be given of a few of the famous manuscripts which have come down to us, arranged in order of date. Most of our examples are taken from manuscripts still pre- served in the British Isles. Their vicissitudes and present state illustrate the dangers which have attended the precarious passage of these treasures across the ocean of time, and many bear traces of fights, of fire, and of shipwreck, in their voyage. B.C. 4000. The oldest writing in the world, on stone, wood, papyrus, or parchment, is probably a monument, with an inscription in Egyptian Hieroglyphics (preserved in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford), of which a representation is given opposite. It is the cornice over a false door of a tomb, the frame of the door- way being still in existence in the Boulak Museum at Cairo, while the only piece which bears an inscrip- tion was presented by Dr. Huntington to the University in 1683. On one side is a seated figure representing Shera, a priest of Send ; on the other, Famous Manuscripts 93 another seated figure of a female. Between them is a table, and on it and below it offerings made to Send. This Send was a king of the second dynasty ; and even if we allow his cult to have continued for 1000 years, the date of the stone would still have to be assigned to about 4000 B.C. The astonishing thing is, that even in this remote antiquity the inscription (the important part of which runs along the upper part) exhibits, not only ideographic writing or only syllabic, but actually alphabetical ! The cartouche bearing the name of the king is written alphabetically thus: ( r> s ) =Send. It adds to the interest of this venerable monument that Egyptian Hieroglyphics are in the direct line of the ancestry of our own alphabet (see p. 20). B.C. 2500. The oldest piece of literary composition known, and the oldest book in existence, are to be found in the celebrated Papyrus Prisse, now in the Louvre at Paris. It consists of eighteen pages in Egyptian Hieratic writing, ascribed to about the year B.C. 2500. But the treatise it contains claims to have been composed as long ago as about B.C. 3350. Curiously enough, these first-fruits of the juventus mundi are a treatise on how to behave wisely, the moralisings of an aged sage, a laudator temporis acti. The early narratives embedded in the Book of Genesis may be 94 Books in Manuscript of equal antiquity, but materials for satisfactorily dating them are at present wholly wanting. B.C. 280-70. It could not well have been foreseen on general ground that the oldest Greek writing (not inscription) preserved to us, would be a curse ! On a papyrus at Vienna, written in uncial characters, and assigned to the early part of the third century B.C., is found a prayer of one Artemisia, calling down vengeance on the father of her dead child for deserting her without supplying even the means with which to bury the infant. This might almost seem a chapter from a nineteenth century novel, were it not that the ancient Greek attributed such age-long consequences to neglect of burial, that there is a stronger emotion in the scene than even we could feel. A.D. 55. One of the most ordinary and prosaic incidents of life, described on no more durable substance than wax, is the subject of the Latin document which has most successfully defied the influence of time. A wax tablet containing the record of a payment made to Umbricia Januaria, scratched with a stilus in cursive letters, now in the National Museum at Naples, and found at Pompeii in 1875, is clearly dated A.D. 55, and takes precedence of all other known Latin documents written by hand. Famous Manuscripts 95 BEFORE A.D. 79. Every reader of Pliny's Epistles remembers the graphic description of the 'Last Days of Pompeii ;' how his uncle, the elder Pliny, was in command of a fleet at Misenum when his attention was called to a column of thick smoke and vapour rising from Vesuvius; how he put to shore in order to observe the phenomenon, and, after being driven from the house where he was staying by the showers of ashes, succumbed at last on the sea-shore, suffocated by sulphurous fumes. The showers of ashes and the streams of lava which overcame the elder Pliny poured over the houses of Herculaneum and Pompeii, filling the rooms, and by their heat reducing the papyrus rolls of the private libraries there to black and desiccated lumps. But what appeared to be destruction was really the condition of safety ; for after they were dug out in the second half of the last century, it was found that, by the most delicate treatment, many of them could be given consist- ency enough to allow of unrolment, and finally of decipherment. Fortunately, facsimiles were carefully taken immediately after the unrolling, partly under the Prince Regent's auspices in 1802-6; and it is now found that the facsimiles are really of more value than the originals, which, even when carefully preserved, can hardly escape decay and disintegra- tion. Out of these rolls have come large fragments of Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher, in Greek, 96 Books in Manuscript and some Latin fragments of poems ; and it is quite possible that in the future still more, and, we may hope, more interesting, specimens of ancient literature may be recovered. The Cot Ionian Genesis. In its original state this celebrated MS. contained 165 quarto leaves, bearing the text of Genesis in Greek, written in uncials, with 250 miniature paint- ings. It was probably written in the fourth century, being the most ancient Greek Septuagint MS. in existence, but is now, unfortunately, a mass of black- ened fragments, some better preserved than others, having been the chief victim in that terrible fire, so often referred to in this volume, which half ruined the Cottonian Collection in 1731. We have, however, collations of the text made before the fire, so that the loss, so far as the text is concerned, is not wholly irreparable ; but the very size of the letters was altered by the heat, and the paintings practically destroyed. The Codex Sinaiticus. The story of the discovery of this famous manu- script of the Bible in Greek, the oldest existing of all the New Testament codexes, and in several points the most interesting, reads like a romance. Con- stantine Tischendorf, the well-known editor of the Greek Testament, started on his first mission litttrairc in April 1844, and in the next month found himself Famous Mamiscripts 97 at the Convent of St. Catherine, at the foot of Mount Sinai. There, in the middle of the hall, as he crossed it, he saw a basket full of old parchment leaves on their way to the burning, and was told that two baskets had already gone ! Looking at the leaves more closely, he perceived that they were parts of the Old Testament in Greek, written in an extremely old handwriting. He was allowed to take away forty-three leaves ; but the interest of the monks was aroused, and they both stopped the burning, and also refused to part with any more of the precious fragments. Tischendorf departed, deposited the forty-three leaves in the Leipzig Library, and edited them under the title of the Codex Friderico- Augustanus, in compliment to the King of Saxony, in 1846. But he wisely kept the secret of their provenance, and no one followed in his track until he himself went on a second quest to the monastery in 1853. In that year he could find no traces whatever of the remains of the MS. except a few fragments of Genesis, and returned unsuccessful and disheartened. At last, he once more took a journey to the monastery, under the patronage of the Russian Emperor, who was popular throughout the East as the protector of the Oriental Churches. Nothing could he find, however ; and he had ordered his Bedouins to get ready for departure, when, happening to have taken a walk with the steward of the house, and to be invited into his room, in the course of conversation the steward said : ' I, too, have read G 98 Books in Mamiscript a Septuagint,' and produced out of a wrapper of red cloth ' a bulky kind of volume,' which turned out to be the whole of the New Testament, with the Greek text of the Epistle of Barnabas, much of which was hitherto unknown, and the greater part of the Old Testament, all parts of the very MS. which had so long been sought ! In a careless tone Tischendorf asked if he might have it in his room for further inspection, and that night (February 4-5, 1859) it 'seemed impiety to sleep.' By the next morning the Epistle of Barnabas was copied out, and a course of action was settled. Might he carry the volume to Cairo to transcribe? Yes, if the Prior's leave were obtained ; but unluckily the Prior had already started to Cairo on his way to Constantinople. By the activity of Tischendorf he was caught up at Cairo, gave the requisite permission, and a Bedouin was sent to the convent, and returned with the book in nine days. On the 24th of February, Tischendorf began to transcribe it ; and when it was done, conceived the happy idea of asking for the volume as a gift to the Emperor of Russia. Probably this was the only possible plea which would have gained the main object in view, and even as it was there was great delay ; but at last, on the 28th of September, the gift was formally made, and the MS. soon after deposited at St. Petersburg, where it now lies. The age of this MS. (known as K) is supposed to be not later than A.D. 400, and has been the subject of minute inquiry in con- Famous Manuscripts 99 sequence of the curious statement of Simonides in 1862, that he had himself written it on Mount Athos in 1839-40 (see p. 127). The Book of Kelts. The Book of Kells, the chief treasure of Trinity College, Dublin, is so called from having been long preserved at the Monastery of Kells, founded by Columba himself. Stolen from thence, it eventually passed into Archbishop Ussher's hands, and, with other parts of his library, to Dublin. The volume contains the Four Gospels in Latin, ornamented with extraordinary freedom, elaboration, and beauty. Written apparently in the seventh century, it exhibits, both in form and colour, all the signs of the full development and maturity of the Irish style, and must of necessity have been preceded by several generations of artistic workers, who founded and improved this particular school of art. The follow- ing words of Professor Westwood, who first drew attention to the peculiar excellences of the volume, will justify the terms made use of above : ' This copy of the Gospels, traditionally asserted to have belonged to Columba, is unquestionably the most elaborately executed MS. of early art now in existence, far excelling, in the gigantic size of the letters in the frontispieces of the Gospel, the excess- ive minuteness of the ornamental details, the number of its decorations, the fineness of the writing, and the endless variety of initial capital letters with which ioo Books in Manuscript every page is ornamented, the famous Gospels of Lindisfarne in the Cottonian Library. But this MS. is still more valuable on account of the various pictorial representations of different scenes in the life of our Saviour, delineated in a style totally unlike that of every other school.' The frontispiece will give some idea of the regularity and beauty of the ornamentation, and of the minuteness and pro- fusion of it, though not of the striking harmonies of colour. The next MS. which would naturally be men- tioned is the Lindisfarne Gospels, in the British Museum, of the seventh century ; but as being already- described in this series of books (see Mr. Elton's The Great Book- Collectors, p. 18), it is here omitted, so far as relates to its general history and description. But the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibit another point of great interest quite recently discovered. Each Gospel is preceded by a list, in the order of the Gospel itself, of saints' days, feasts, vigils, etc., on which passages from that Gospel were read ; that is to say, the first days recorded are those on which passages from the first chapter were read, and so on. In 1891 a Benedictine monk observed that the lists clearly proved that the liturgy thus summarised was that of Naples, and was of extreme interest, being more than two centuries older than the oldest known Neapolitan calendar. But how was it possible for an early calendar of Naples to appear in a Gospel Famous Manuscripts 101 book written at Lindisfarne in the seventh century? The answer is supplied by Bede, who, in describing the early work of Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, after his arrival in England in 668, says that in his peregrination of England he was accom- panied by one Adrian, formerly abbot of a monastery near Naples. At Lindisfarne the archbishop was to consecrate St. Aidan's new cathedral, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the abbot brought with him some volumes from his own abbey, and that the monks of Holy Island took the opportunity of transcribing for their own use this volume. Curiously enough, another less famous MS., also in the British Museum (in the Old Royal Collection), is found to have the same calendar prefixed, and doubtless was written at the same place and time. Directly, the volumes lead us back to the services of Naples in the first half of the seventh century, that is to say, of the time of St. Gregory ; indirectly, they lead to something still more striking. Naples is not far from Rome ; and when it is remembered that no extant MSS. carry us beyond the eighth century in the quest of ancient Roman service books, the real value of these two MSS. becomes clear. They pre- sent to us the nearest attainable clue to the most ancient liturgical ceremonies of Rome itself. Alcuin's Bible. The connexion of Alcuin of York with the literary reforms of Charles the Great has been already referred IO2 Books in Manuscript to (see p. 27). It was natural that the head of the school of Tours should show gratitude to his patron on so great an occasion as the coronation of Charles the Great as Emperor of Rome on Christmas Day in A.D. 800 ; and from contemporary sources we know that this gratitude took the form of a Latin Bible written under the immediate super- intendence of Alcuin, and with a text amended by himself. There is still in existence a Latin Bible directly ascribed to Alcuin himself, a volume bought in 1836 by the British Museum, which sufficiently answers to the required age, and, indeed, to everything which we know of the circumstances of the gift. At the end are certain verses in which the writer's name is given as Alcuinus and Albinus (a not infrequent variety of the former name). It is a splendid volume, both in size and from the four full-page illuminations which, with other smaller paintings, adorn the text. It is known, however, that similar verses are found in another Latin Bible now at Rome, so that the claim of this volume to be the actual gift of the great English scholar and teacher to the Emperor who honoured him, is not incontestable, and the date is asserted to be more probably forty years later than 800. The Old English Chronicle. The chronological Annals of England, known familiarly as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is said to be the finest existing record, having regard to its Famous Manuscripts 103 antiquity and detail, of the early history of a nation. It begins, after a brief preface, with Julius Caesar's landing in England, B.C. 65 ; and though at first affording notices of general history, soon settles down to a history of Britain alone. The MSS. we possess of it are extremely interesting in their differences, for almost every one contributes local colouring and local history to the common stock, and each carries the chronicle proper down to a different date. Six complete MSS. still exist : one in the splendid library bequeathed by Archbishop Parker to Corpus Christi Library at Cambridge, which was written in 891 and continued to 1070, and which, having been first at Winchester, was transferred before it was finally completed to Christ Church, Canterbury ; a second, written in one hand, and ending with A.D. 977, now in the British Museum (Cotton Tiberius, A. vi.), but formerly also at Canterbury, and noticeable for the incorporation (as is the case also with the next two MSS.) of a Mercian chronicle for the years 902-924 ; a third, an Abingdon chronicle, written in one hand to 1046, and continued to 1066, and now in the British Museum (Cotton Tiberius, B. i.) ; a fourth from Worcester, embodying some Northumbrian annals, written in 1016, with additions to 1079, novv also in the National Library (Cotton Tiberius, B. iv.); a fifth, given by Archbishop Laud to the Bodleian (Laud Misc. 636), abounding in Peterborough history, and though written in A.D. 1122, continued in Peter- borough Abbey to 1154, which is three-quarters of a IO4 Books in Manuscript century beyond any other ; and lastly, a Canterbury MS. of the twelfth century, curious for being bilingual, in Saxon and Latin, and now in the Museum (Cotton Domitian, A. viii.). A seventh was burnt, with the exception of three leaves, in the fatal fire of 1731 (Cotton Otho, B. xi.), but is known from previous editions, and ended in A.D. 1001; and a single leaf of an eighth is known in yet another Cotton MS. (Domitian^ A. ix.). This wealth of material gives every facility for a thorough knowledge of the Chronicle, difficult as it is to determine the method and date of its original formation. It is quite possible that Alfred himself ordered its compilation, and at any rate it was formed after Bede's death in 731, and before 895, when Asser, the biographer of Alfred, quotes it. Beowulf. The great fire of 1731, which caused such irre- parable damage to the Cottonian Library, mutilated and nearly deprived us for ever of the earliest English epic, and, with the possible exception of Widsith, of the earliest known English poem. This is known by the name of Beowulf, the hero whose combats with the fiend Grendel and with a dragon, and his death from his wounds, form the subject of the book. The scene professes to be laid in Denmark, and most German scholars attribute its formation (out of older materials) to about the year 600 ; but the latest translator of Beowulf, Professor Famous Manuscripts 105 Earle, believes that the object of the book was to instruct the English folk of the time of Offa, King of Mercia, in the true education and feelings of a prince. It is supposed, therefore, by him to have been written in the eighth century, on English soil, though it has survived to our time only in a single MS. of about the date 1000, of which the first notice of any kind is not earlier than A.D. 1705, and the first printed edition that of Thorkelin in 1815. Caedmon. The earliest personal name in the history of Eng- lish literature is that of Caedmon, the cow-herd of Whitby, in about the middle of the seventh century. Bede, who had good opportunities for knowing the facts about him, tells us how, when each person after supper had to sing a song to his harp, and the turn came to him, Caedmon would slink out, ashamed and stupid, rather than attempt to sing. But in a dream a voice said to him, ' Caedmon, sing, sing something to me ; ' and when he pleaded ignor- ance and incapacity, and inquired what he should sing, ' Sing,' said the voice, ' the beginning of created things.' Then Caedmon broke out into impromptu song; and when the matter came to the ears of Hilda, the foundress and first Abbess of Whitby, she caused him to be educated, and exercise his gift of song as a monk. A few of his actual words seem to be preserved to us by Bede; but one MS., preserved in the Bodleian, has long been supposed to contain, io6 Books in Manuscript in a modified form, a large part of the poems of Caedmon. The name of the poet does not occur, but the contents agree fairly closely with what we know from Bede were the subjects of our first Eng- lish poet's songs. These are, of course, all religious, consisting of metrical paraphrases of Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Daniel, with descriptions of scenes in Christ's life and of the day of judgment. Modern critics are disposed to deny any connexion between these West Saxon poems and the Northumbrian songs of Caedmon, but it is still at least possible that this MS., written like that of Beowulf about 1000, contains a substratum and, as the writer in the Dictionary of National Biography is willing to admit, some whole passages from the poet himself. Not the least interesting feature of the MS. is the draw- ings, chiefly in outline, with slight colouring, with which it abounds. They are of genuine Old English character, and are valuable, not for their fidelity to the subject to be elucidated, but for the evidences they afford of contemporary English life. Thus, when the ark is to be delineated, the artist racks his brain to think of the largest ship which he has ever seen, and presents us (see the illustration opposite) with a picture of a Danish war galley, with carved figurehead, the side paddle used for steering, and many of the details of the Viking ship discovered in Norway a few years ago. On the deck of this he places a large box to contain the animals. So, too, the architectural details of some buildings here lifftr- Hynoe- karri Wl ngm- mftT'^ sArio hUpgtiui'innon -yumn- tbrt^n "^>rfynr>fU5 cynn-Svmlf-trSf'y ; A/lli'^-p-]* 5 * F^ 4^?>b?kl ;;; -i>^4 lt!M,lfei ^ ' x ""\x V. Y ' '' -' -ar.si ; *i* //.^ / y\^M\ ^ "^ \ Vji! ! / - s n-*~- ' CAEDMON (C. JOOO, ENGLISH^ Famous Manuscripts 107 drawn are of value for determining the style of church building of that period. St. Margaret's Gospel-Book. The figure of St. Margaret, Queen of Scotland, is perhaps the most striking in the early history of that kingdom. Having regard to the rough times of the eleventh century, and her immense personal influence, we may say that she did more to refine and civilise a nation than any queen before or after her. No wonder that the Scotch cherish her memory with especial reverence, and that her oratory in Edinburgh Castle is to them one of the most venerated relics of the past. Grand-daughter of Edmund Ironside, sister of Edgar the Atheling, and mother of the wife of Henry I., she is in the direct line by which our present Queen traces her descent from the English kings before the Conquest. Margaret fled before the Conqueror to Scotland, and sought refuge in the court of Malcolm Canmore, King of Scotland, who, in about A.D. 1070, married her. For details of her character and life from this period till her death in 1093, no better account can be wished than her Life written by one who knew her intimately, printed in the Bol- landist Acta Sanctorum and elsewhere, and issued in English by Father William Forbes-Leith (2nd ed., London 1889). The discovery of her most treasured volume, which she must often have used, as foundress, within the splendid choir of Dunfermline Abbey, has preserved, it may be hoped, to all time a volume, io8 Books in Manuscript small indeed in size, but of the deepest interest alike to the antiquary, the Church historian, and the liturgiologist. Six years ago a little octavo volume in worn brown binding stood on the shelves of a small parish library in Suffolk, but was turned out and offered at the end of a sale at Sotheby's, presumably as being unreadable to country folk, and capable of being turned into hard cash wherewith a few works of fiction might be pur- chased. The contempt for it thus displayed was apparently shared by the cataloguer, who described it as ' Latin Gospels of the Fourteenth Century, with English Illuminations.' For the sum of 6 it passed into the Bodleian Library, and came to be catalogued as an ordinary accession. It was noticed that the writ- ing was of the eleventh century, and that the illumi- nations were valuable specimens of old English work of the same century, comprising figures of the four evangelists of the Byzantine type, which was common in the west of Europe ; the drapery, however, colour- ing and accessories were purely English. The book itself was seen to be not the complete Gospels, but such portions as were used in the service of the Mass at different times of the year. Further, it was observed that a poem in Latin hexameters had been written, apparently before the end of the same century, on a fly-leaf of the volume, which began by thanking Christ for ' displaying miracles to us in our own days,' and went on to describe how this very volume had been carried in the folds of a priest's robe to a trysting- Famous Manuscripts 109 place, in order that a binding oath might be taken on it ; but that unfortunately it had been dropped, without the priest observing it, into a stream, and given up for lost. But a soldier of the party at last discovered it, plunged head first into the river, and brought it up. To every one's intense surprise, the beautiful volume was entirely uninjured, 'except two leaves, which you see at each end, in which a slight contraction appears from the effect of the water, which testify the work of Christ in protecting the sacred volume. That this work might appear to us still more miraculous, the wave washed from the middle of the book a leaf of silk. May the King and pious Queen be saved for ever, whose book was but now saved from the waves ! ' The silk was, no doubt, pieces placed loosely in the book to preserve the illuminations from contact with the page opposite ; and, sure enough, a leaf at each end of the book showed unmistakeable crinkling from immersion in water. But who were the King and Queen ? By a curious accident connected with the name of Margaret, a lady to whom this story was told remembered a similar incident in Forbes-Leith's Life of St. Margaret of Scotland, and the mystery was solved. There in the Life is a passage in prose, begin- ning : ' She had a book of the Gospels beautifully adorned with gold and precious stones, and orna- mented with the figures of the four evangelists, painted and gilt. . . . She had always felt a particular attach- ment for this book, more so than for any of the others which she usually read.' Then follows a story almost 1 10 Books in Manuscript identical with the one given above, with some variant but not discrepant details. It, too, mentions the pieces of silk and the contraction on certain leaves, and adds that it was found lying open at the bottom of the river. If anything could add to the interest of the volume, it is that in the same Life we read of the King, that ' although he could not read, he would turn over and examine books which the Queen used either for her devotions or her study ; and whenever he heard her express especial liking for a particular book, he also would look at it with special interest, kissing it, and often taking it into his hands.' A ROYAL PSALTER. The fortunes of MSS. are well illustrated by a MS. now in Exeter College Library at Oxford. It is a Latin Psalter, followed, as usual, by canticles, a litany and prayers, beautifully illuminated in Eng- lish style, and from the joint occurrence of the Royal arms and those of Bohun, and the occurrence of the name Humphrey in a collect, probably written and painted for Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford (d. 1361), grandson of Edward L, whose grandniece was married to Henry IV. in 1380. Through her it passed into the Royal Library ; but seems specially to have belonged to the Queens, for both Elizabeth of York and Katherine of Arragon have written their names. In the calendar are obits of the Royal family up to the time of Henry VIII., and no doubt it passed to Famous Manuscripts 1 1 1 Elizabeth. She seems to have parted with it to Sir William Petre, the re-founder of Exeter College, to which he presented it. Thus it happens that the successive possession of the Tudor sovereigns, and the only original authority for the date of the birth of the founder of the Tudor dynasty (Jan. 28, ' Hie natus est rex Henricus vij us ,' I45f), has dropped into a quiet college library. The foregoing are a selection, as numerous as the scale of the present work would allow, of the best known MSS. of great libraries; but even though the volumes described are nearly all within the British Isles, the list is very far from exhausted. No place has been found for the splendid Hiberno-Saxon MSS. other than the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels, such as the Chad Gospels at Lichfield, the Gospels of M'Durnan at Lambeth, and several more ; for the Benedictional of St. Ethelwold (see p. 89) ; for the original Magna Charta in the British Museum ; for the Paston Letters, an unique example of English domestic correspondence from 1422 to 1509; or for the Syriac version of Genesis and Exodus, dated A.D. 775, and believed to be the earliest dated MS. extant of any entire book of the Scriptures ; or for the treasures of foreign libraries. But, indeed, to give an account of such MSS. as suggest them- selves as famous, would require a volume of itself, and turn a manual like the present into a catalogue. CHAPTER IX. LITERARY FORGERIES. FORGERIES occupy no inconsiderable part of literary history, and it is even true that the study of ancient writing began in the endeavour to supply tests by which genuine deeds of a legal character could be established, and forgeries detected. In the great Benedictine work by Mabillon, De Re Diplo- matica (1681, etc.), a vast treatise, written with this particular object, the whole of Book iv., or nearly one- sixth of the entire work, is taken up with a list of 163 palaces belonging to the kings of France. This would seem irrelevant, until we understand that one of the greatest difficulties which a forger of some deed of gift would encounter, would be to know where the king was at any particular date which he might select for his spurious work. This list, there- fore, supplies an invaluable means of detecting any mistake in the place where the deed is supposed to have been executed, which would almost always occur in a genuine deed, and therefore must be some- how supplied by the forger. But the forgeries of legal deeds were, as a rule, tracked out by the sagacity of lawyers ; and the really gigantic frauds 112 Literary Forgeries 1 1 3 of literature have been perpetrated in the fields of theology or of history. Before we give illustrations of some famous liter- ary forgeries, it will be well if we try to enter into the forger's mind, for it must be admitted that the subject introduces us to what may be called a high and refined order of crime. Forgery of a literary document, to be successful, requires an intellect of no ordinary acuteness. Not only has a style to be imitated, but the numberless inter-dependent colli- gated facts of a particular time and place have to be profoundly studied. Usually facts have to be added which are not to be found in existing author- ities, to give an air of original knowledge, and these guesses must be capable of satisfying the ever-increasing knowledge and the soundest methods of criticism of the age. Undesigned coincidences are among the subtlest solvents of a forgery, and proofs of a genuine record. Old paper with its ap- propriate watermarks, or parchment carefully stained, has to be provided and duly discoloured : the ink must be of the right tint and appearance, and the writing, not slowly and falteringly traced, but of a firm, boldly drawn kind. The forger, in fact, has to be armed at every point, and the cost of the armour is fortunately, in many cases, prohibitive. But when once obtained, as in the case of Constan- tine Simonides, the fraud seems to have a veritable fascination for acute and unprincipled adventurers. Again, forgery, really to deserve the name, must be li 1 1 4 Books in Manuscript made with intent to deceive, whether that deception be for purely humorous purposes or for some sordid gain. For we may remember the example of Thucydides, who deliberately puts rhetorical speeches, which belong both in point of thought and expres- sion to his own time, in the mouths of his characters, yet neither deceived nor intended to deceive his Athenian readers. This case, which, of course, is not one of forgery, yet shows how carefully its character- istics have to be defined. But even when the aim is reprehensible, it is not enough to put down all forgeries under one class it is essential to take into consideration both the character of the man, and the moral standard of his time. There is a wide difference between Chatterton, whose boyish mind was entranced by the old papers he found in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliffe, seeing in them a means of building a reputation, while himself far too young to be treated as a precocious man of the world ; and such machinators as Ireland or Shapira, whose sole thought was the money to be gained by their scheming. Between them may rank the men who, conscious of great powers both of mind and hand, and under considerable tempta- tion, deliberately set themselves to forge and foist on the world some of the lost treatises of antiquity, either to support preconceived theories of their own, or enjoying the excitement and the uncertainty, the sense of superiority in the hour of success, and the boldness of their bid for prosperity. Literary Forgeries 115 The interest of forgeries for the student of litera- ture lies in the method of detection. The same tests which expose the spurious work, establish tenfold the character of what remains. It is the clear cut which they enable us to make between truth and seeming truth which shows that these tests are not merely empirical rules. I. The Letters of Phalaris. Phalaris was ' tyrant ' of Agrigentum in Sicily in the sixth century B.C., and for a thousand years no writings of his were known. At last Stobaeus, in the fifth century A.D., quotes certain letters of Phalaris, and the collection was generally received as genuine. In fact, in the controversy which arose in the latter part of the seventeenth century on the comparative merits of ancient and modern literature, Sir William Temple went so far as to write (in 1680), ' I think the Epistles of Phalaris to have more Race, more Spirit, more Force of Wit and Genius, than any others I have ever seen. ... I think he must have little Skill in Painting, that cannot find out this to be an Original,' with much to the same effect. This language stimu- lated the Scholars of Christ Church at Oxford, who were in the habit of producing a classical book once a year, to issue an edition of the Epistles, which was entrusted to the Hon. Robert Boyle, and appeared in 1695. It would probably have excited little atten- tion, but that the one great critic which England had produced, Dr. Richard Bentley, inserted in the 1 1 6 Books in Manuscript second edition of his friend William Wotton's Reflec- tions upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1697), a Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, which appeared, not only to contemporary scholars, but to all succeeding critics, a very miracle of learning, logic, and ingenuity ; in fact, in the opinion of no mean scholar of this century, ' he so absolutely settled the question, that to a very dolt the maintenance of the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris must seem absurd.' The triumph was not immediate, for an attempted answer to it was published by Boyle in 1698, which drew from Bentley in the following year the second and complete edition of his Dissertation. The celebrated Boyle and Bentley controversy went on for some years, but nothing could shake the greatness of his Dissertation, and it has always been acknowledged as the greatest product of English scholarship in the eighteenth century. Bentley 's method was not to examine the MSS. for signs of falsity, for no MSS. of the date of the forger are extant, much less the forger's autograph, but simply to rely on the internal evidence of the letters themselves. Before his dissecting-knife they fell to pieces. Towns were found to be mentioned which were founded after Phalaris. The Messenians and Zancleans are both named, though Zancle was only the old name of Messene, the two towns being one and the same ; Phalaris is angry with a poet who wrote tragedies against him, though both the name Literary Forgeries 117 and thing were unknown till later; the letters are in an Attic dialect instead of the Doric of Sicily, and not even in the Attic of Phalaris' time, but in New Attic. So, too, the coins mentioned are wrong, and wrong just as a forger would go astray ; for when he speaks of talents, the computation shows that he is thinking of Attic talents, each of which was worth 2000 Sicilian talents. Finally, Bentley shows that words were used in a sense first given them by Plato, and points out numerous inconsistencies in the matter itself. But these points are elucidated with so much solid first-hand learning, with such fresh- ness, and in so humorous and persuasive a style, that in spite of the immense strides we have since taken in these very departments of knowledge, the Dissertation is still thoroughly instructive as well as entertaining reading. 2. The False Decretals. The early history of Church Law, as the history of the Canon of the New Testament, abounds with apocryphal and spurious works, though it is often difficult to say with what amount of deliberate desire to mislead they were fabricated. The first two docu- ments of Canon or Church Law are spurious, the Apostolic Constitutions and the Apostolic Canons, neither having any connexion with the apostles themselves. They are, however, venerable docu- ments, and throw a clear light on the history of the time when they were fabricated. Several genuine 1 1 8 Books in Manuscript collections of Canons of ecclesiastical councils were made in succeeding centuries ; and among them the Hispana (sc. collectio), representing chiefly Spanish Canon Law, attained celebrity. At last, in the ninth century, one Isidorus Mercator (often confused with the greater Isidor, Bishop of Seville) edited the Hispana, but foisted into it no less than ninety-five fictitious Decretals (or authoritative letters from popes to bishops on points in dispute), the earliest professing to be dated A.D. 101 ! They were recog- nised as genuine by Pope Nicholas I. in A.D. 865, who did not scruple to assure Hincmar, against whom they were used, that the originals had lain for cen- turies in the Roman archives. They were, in fact, accepted everywhere until the fifteenth century, when, under the criticism of Erasmus and other scholars, they dissolved away. The extent to which the claims of the Papacy were affected by these convenient forgeries is a keenly-debated point ; but while it is clear, on the one hand, that the intention of the False Decretals was mainly to protect the bishops from the interference of both laymen and councils, yet the policy they professed to initiate, of an appeal to the pope in all greater causes, did certainly aid the popes in their later struggles for temporal power ; and the Decretum of Gratian (in the eleventh century), which is at the base of the system of Canon Law, certainly received and incorporated these forged documents. Literary Forgeries 1 19 3. Ingulphus. Among the monastic chronicles of England, the most considerable forgery is that of the Latin History of the Abbey of Croyland, attributed to Ingulphus, an abbot of that monastery, who died in 1109. The historian Ordericus Vitalis went to Croyland within a few weeks of Ingulphus' death, collected all the information he could get on the spot, gives us a con- siderable and authentic account of him, and says no word of his having written a detailed history of the abbey. When the narrative is looked into, the usual signs of imposture appear. The original charters of the house, which are quoted in full, abound with errors bishops attest deeds before their appointment or after their death, names of places are spelt before the Conquest as they were spelt in the fifteenth cen- tury, feudal words occur too early, lands are granted (in A.D. 1013) for one hundred years at a nominal rent when neither kind of condition was in use in England before the Conquest, and the like. So, too, in the narrative itself, Ingulphus describes his educa- tion at Oxford, where he studied Cicero and Aris- totle, at a time when Aristotle was in no part of Christendom studied at all ; and admits numerous anachronisms both of language and fact. The curious thing is that four out of five known MSS. of the work have disappeared since A.D. 1600. One 'very ancient ' one, described as the autograph of Ingulphus, used to be kept at Croyland under lock and key, but I2O Books in Manuscript disappeared in the middle of the seventeenth century ; a Cotton MS. which Selden used was burnt in the great fire of 1731 (see p. 81) ; Marsham's codex can- not be traced after about 1690, and Sir Henry Savile's is utterly lost. All that remains is an Arundei MS. in the British Museum, written in the sixteenth century ! This circumstance, and the solid sub- stratum of fact which the History undoubtedly displays (though apparently only adapted from Ordericus Vitalis and others), have induced several modern critics to uphold this suspicious record, and to ascribe its errors to ignorant embellishers. But the fact remains that no statement in the entire History can be accepted without corroboration, and that every note of imposture may be found in its pages. 4. Chatterton. Thomas Chatterton, the boy-poet, was born in poor circumstances in the parish of St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol. In early years he had access, not only to the church itself, where heraldry and monumental effigies caught the eye at every turn, but also to the muni- ment room, where ' Canynge's Coffer, 5 a massive chest, once secured by six keys, but then forced and lying open, supplied numerous opportunities of studying the style and characters of ancient writing. These surroundings and the few books to which he had access predisposed a mind of great power and activity to the study of old English (for the boy never learnt Latin), and he soon compiled a double glossary, of old Literary Forgeries 121 words with their modern meanings, and of current words with their ancient equivalents. The first use he made of his special knowledge and powers was to produce, in 1764, his twelfth year, a poem entitled ' Elinoure and Juga.' In 1765 he had conceived the idea of making Thomas Rowley, a supposed monk, the fictitious author of several poems. Three years after, Bristol Bridge was reopened with some cere- mony, and the city was startled by an elaborate narrative in a newspaper of the first passage of the Mayor over the bridge in 1248. The interest this excited, stimulated Chatterton to produce in the same year the best of his poems, the tragical interlude of ylla. Next we find the youth bold enough to write to Horace Walpole, enclosing some old English poems ; but the great man, after a short time of uncertainty, showed his applicant the cold shoulder, and returned the poems. The last period of Chatter- ton's short and clouded life was spent in London, where, after some bold bids for fame, and chilling failures, he put an end to his life on August 25, 1770. In Chatterton's forgeries we find the least occasion that can be imagined for wholesale condemnation, and the greatest for pity and indulgence. To his family and even to his friends he confessed, under very little pressure, the simple truth, and the greatest harm he did was to himself. Critics soon saw that the language of the Rowley poems was a mixture of the forms and vocabulary of all past time, and that the matter teemed, as was inevitable, with anachronisms 122 Books in Manuscript and impossibilities. Poems in the author's own name would have secured attention and brought him re- putation, so that meanness at least was wanting to his deceit. And we cannot but wonder what future would have been in store, under happier conditions, for one of whom Walpole could say that he knew of no one with so masterly a genius, and who even drew from Johnson the testimony that he was the most extraordinary young man that had encountered his knowledge. 5. The Ireland Forgeries. The temporary success of what are known as the Ireland forgeries, so lately as the close of the last century, can only make us wonder at the invincible credulity of mankind. William Henry Ireland, born in 1777, was the son of a small publisher and book- seller who was enthusiastic about Shakespeare and Shakespeariana. The temptation to the son to play upon his father's weakness was too strong to be resisted, and as early as 1794 the latter was shown a lease purporting to be signed by Shakespeare. The success of this practical joke led to further results. Shakespeare's love-letters, one enclosing a lock of his hair, and countless similar relics, were produced, and a statement that they were given by the poet to William Henrye Irelaunde in gratitude for a rescue from drowning. The father, who was quite innocently duped, published these, and many persons accepted them as genuine. At last, as might have been fore- Literary Forgeries 123 seen, a complete play was discovered, with the title ' Vortigern,' and Sheridan actually produced it on April 2nd (it should have been the 1st !), 1/96, at Drury Lane Theatre. The preparation for this was the crowning point of Ireland's triumph ; for as soon as the play was printed and studied, both the language and sentiments betrayed the fraud. This prevented the appearance of Henry II., another play which had already been written ; and in the same year came a crushing exposure from the pen of Edmund Malone, the Shakespearian commentator, and also both im- mediately and in 1705 a confession by Ireland him- self, in which he displays a certain amount of satisfied vanity at the success he attained. The extraordinary scantiness of our knowledge of Shakespeare's personal life, and of the authority and relationship of the Folio and Quarto editions of his plays, has unfortunately stimulated others than Ireland to concoct some of the missing information; and even in this century a deliberate attempt was made to pass off forged and falsified records as genuine, by John Payne Collier (d. 1883), who from 1831 to at least 1853 issued Shakespearian books in which a certain ' Perkin's Folio' and Alleyn MSS. at Dulwich were freely drawn upon, both of which sources were demonstrably manufactured or tampered with by insertion. 1 24 Books in Manuscript 6. Constantine Simonides. The greatest forger of this century was undoubtedly Constantine Simonides, a Greek, who was born in 1824. To meet the requirements of modern critics who know styles of writing, the colours of the ink and paints of different times, and the very kinds of parchment used, there is need of such a combination of intellect with versatility, industry with ingenuity, as is rarely found. Yet, as even Juvenal could instance the audacity of the Grcsculus esuriens, so in modern times that mixed race has shown many of the qualities which, when perverted to a base use, produce the skilled forger. Simonides started by becoming a citizen of the world. From 1843 on > we find him successively on the shores of the Euxine, in Asia Minor, Thrace, Athos (where he wrote a hagiography), the ^Lgean, Cyprus, Alexandria, Cairo, Sinai (1844), Syria, Babylon, Persia, Russia, and Constantinople (in 1846). His next journeys were from Greece to Constantinople again, Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Germany ; then again to Egypt, the ^Egean coasts, and finally to Liverpool (in 1853) and London. His stock-in-trade was a large number both of genuine MSS., obtained largely from Mount Athos, and of forged ones written by himself; and his custom was to present first some genuine ones, and when his customer was off his guard, some of the second sort ; while he paid England and Germany the dubious compliment of selecting them as the field L iterary Forgeries 125 of his operations, as possessing either the largest amount of hard cash, or the greatest number of pro- bable dupes. Even in 1846 he is stated to have been in possession of 5000 MSS., which he exhibited to savants at Athens. In 1854 and 1855, Simonides was well known at the British Museum and the Bodleian ; but Sir Frederick Madden extracted a considerable number of genuine MSS. from him at the former place, while Mr. Coxe, when asked his opinion of the date of some presented to him in Oxford, assigned them to the latter half of the nineteenth century. In Sir Thomas Phillipps, however, Simonides found a less critical purchaser, and in the great Phillipps Library at Cheltenham are to be found some of the finest specimens of his powers in a Phocylides, an Ana- creon, and a boustrophedon l Hesiod. In 1855 he visited Berlin and Leipzig; and when in July he met Wilhelm Dindorf, he informed him that he owned a Greek palimpsest, containing three books of records of the Egyptian kings, by Uranius of Alex- andria, son of Anaximenes. Dindorf offered a large price for it, but Simonides loftily replied that he intended to publish it first himself, and then to give the original to the library at Athens. By persistence, however, Dindorf obtained temporary possession of 1 BoufvptxpriSot (boustrophedon, ' in the manner in which an ox turns ') describes an ancient method of writing, in which the first line was written from left to right, the second from right to left, the third as the first, and so on : just as an ox in ploughing traces each successive furrow in an opposite direction to the preceding one. 126 Books in Manuscript the precious palimpsest, and sent it to Berlin, where it deceived all the members of the Academy except Humboldt ; and the King of Prussia offered .700 for the seventy-one leaves. Further, Dindorfs representa- tions induced the Clarendon Press at Oxford to take up the treatise, and, indeed, it could hardly have done otherwise, and actual specimens were printed, with a preface by Dindorf, and early in 1856 pub- lished. Only seven copies were sold, besides the eleven sent to the delegates of the Press, when the news came that Uranius was a most uncelestial forgery. It was found (i) that the ancient writing of Uranius was on the top of the later twelfth century writing, as could clearly be seen by the help of a microscope ; (2) that the Greek was far from correct ; l and (3) that the coincidence between the most recent views of Lepsius and other Berlin Egyptologists and the new-found treatise was a little too striking. After this, Uranius was very little heard of; but Simonides continued to be in evidence, for he was put on his trial at Leipzig to answer two distinct charges that he had stolen the MS. from the Turkish Royal Library ; and that he had forged it himself. To the first he triumphantly replied that, if it was stolen, it was at least not a forgery ; that they were bound to show in what library and in what catalogue it was marked as missing ; and, finally, that the Turks had no libraries, and did not know what they were. To 1 Kar' ijttriv <3iav represented 'in my opinion', and ffwu^i/riv, 'wrote in short form ' 1 Literary Forgeries 127 the second plea he replied by a threat, which must have carried conviction to the dullest of his judges, to the effect that, if they would prove it was a forgery, he would forthwith print, under his own name, the other works of Uranius which he pos- sessed, and achieve fame as the cleverest of authors, by exhibiting a knowledge of details which reached far beyond existing evidence ! In the end he was banished from Saxony, a kingdom which he was probably, on other grounds, not unwilling to quit. After this Simonides appeared only once with any prominence before the public, when in 1861 he boldly asserted that he himself had written the whole of the Codex Sinaiticus, which Tischendorf had brought in 1856 from the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. The statement was, of course, received with the utmost incredulity ; but Simonides asserted, not only that he had written it, but that, in view of the probable scepticism of scholars, he had placed certain private signs on particular leaves of the codex. When pressed to specify these marks, he gave a list of the leaves on which were to be found his initials or other monogram. The test was a fair one, and the MS., which was at St. Petersburg, was carefully inspected. Every leaf designated by Simonides was found to be imperfect at the part where the mark was to have been found. Deliberate mutilation by an enemy, said his friends. But many thought that the wily Greek had acquired through private friends a note of some imperfect leaves in the 128 Books in Manuscript MS., and had made unscrupulous use of the informa- tion. Certainly Simonides' work, as evidenced by the MSS. now at Cheltenham, was careful and laborious to a very high degree ; but the absolute breakdown of his pretensions, and of those of his only successor in audacity, Shapira, who in the year 1883 demanded ; i, 000,000 for an ancient fragment of the Hebrew Pentateuch containing an eleventh commandment, ' Thou shalt not hate thy brother,' seem to show- that it is now almost impossible to deceive per- manently the trained scholars and palaeographers who are to be found in Germany, France, and England. 7. The Vrain-Lucas Forgeries. The collection of autograph letters has a great and natural attraction for many persons. Instead of a single author's works in manuscript, the collector of autographs obtains specimens of the handwriting of any number of celebrities, who may belong to a period or nation or class in which he is specially interested, or may represent general fame. For him all who can write are authors, and his ambition is to obtain an a. I. s. (autograph letter signed), or at least a signature of all who come within the scope of his designs. There is a chiromancy connected with handwritings as well as hands, and the possession of an important and unpublished letter of a notable per- sonage not only stimulates our interest, but may con- tribute something, if only through a study of literary Literary Forgeries 129 style and handwriting, to an appreciation of his character. The most celebrated trial in connexion with literary forgeries was perhaps that of Vrain-Lucas in 1870, for the most unblushing manufacture of autograph letters. The chief interest attached to the dupe and not the forger, for M. Chasles, besides being a collector of autographs, was a celebrated geome- trician, and a Member of the French Academy. It is hardly credible that Vrain-Lucas between 1861 and 1869 supplied M. Chasles with no less than 27,000 autographs, for which he received 140,000 francs. These included letters of Julius Caesar, Cicero, Socrates, and Shakespeare, and six were from Alexander the Great to Aristotle ! After this we can receive with calmness the information that one was from Pontius Pilate to Tiberius, and one from Judas Iscariot to St. Mary Magdalene ! The cream of it was that nearly every letter was in modern French, and on paper, and that the watermark of the paper was in many cases a fleur-de-lys. However, M. Chasles was prepared to receive any number in addition, when a circumstance induced him to submit some of his collections to wiser men than himself. He was engaged in writing a book to prove that the discovery of the principle of gravitation was not due to Sir Isaac Newton, but to Pascal. Vrain-Lucas, knowing this, supplied him with a correspondence between Pascal and the Hon. Robert Boyle, and finally between Pascal and Newton himself, on the I 130 Books in Manuscript deepest 'questions of geometry, although the latter was at the supposed date just eleven years old. This was too interesting to be concealed, and was accord- ingly exhibited with pride to the Academy. But M. Prosper Faugere and Sir David Brewster, who was a Foreign Correspondent of the Academy, denounced the letters at once on general grounds as a forgery, and after a short investigation the whole edifice collapsed. To illustrate a scientific principle, a cup of coffee was introduced in a letter, some years before coffee was known in Paris. French letters of Galileo were produced, though Galileo was never able to write that language ; and in the end Vrain-Lucas was brought to trial and condemned to imprisonment. The only redeeming feature about the affair was that, with the exception of a very few letters, the whole of the forgeries had been purchased by M. Chasles, and none escaped to disseminate the deception. The boldest attempt in modern times to prove an accepted book to be a forgery is undoubtedly that of Ross (1883) and Hochart (1890), who both declare that the sole MS. of the early part of Tacitus's immortal Annals (Books i.-vi.) was written by Poggio Bracciolini, the Italian scholar of the Renaissance. The MS. is generally believed to be of the eleventh century, but it is well known (see p. 30) that a revival of the style of that and (more usually) the succeeding century did take place in the fifteenth Literary Forgeries \ 3 1 century ; and it is maintained that Poggio had not only practice in the imitation of old writings, but also opportunities in connexion with this particular codex. It undoubtedly is remarkable that there is only one clear reference to any part of the Annals before the fifteenth century, namely, that Ruodolphus, a monk of Fulda in the ninth century, mentions him as writing of the river Visurgis (Annals, Books i. and ii.). But it may be remembered that Catullus also was entirely lost sight of for centuries together, and except that one of his poems occurs in a tenth century Anthology, depends altogether on MSS. not written before the second half of the fourteenth century. As Mr. Furneaux, the most recent editor of the Annals ; and the only one who has had to defend their genuineness, says, we ought to be satisfied with a few clear instances of facts unknown in the Middle Ages, mentioned only by Tacitus and confirmed by more recent epigraphical discoveries. Of these he gives a list, the nature of which can be gathered from the following samples. They may seem insignificant, but it is their insignificance which makes them for this special purpose of real import- ance. Nero, the eldest son of Germanicus, is stated by Tacitus to have been espoused to a daughter of Creticus Silanus. An inscription, discovered since the time of Poggio, confirms this, and supplies the name Junia. Tacitus again especially notes that Julia Augusta, in dedicating a statue to Augustus, gave offence to Tiberius by placing her name before 132 Books in Manuscript his. The Praenestine Calendar confirms the fact by giving the names in the same order. There remains one extraordinary proof of a kind hardly to be paralleled elsewhere. Tacitus writes in one place, referring to a Frisian insurrection, ad sua tutanda digressis rebellibus (the insurgents having moved off to protect their own quarters) ; but Ptolemy, who wrote in Greek only one generation after Tacitus, must have had the Annals before him, for in a list of towns in North Germany he gives the name of one as 'SiaTouravda. (Siatontando), which cannot be any- thing else than a mistaken idea that sua tutanda was the name of the place to which the insurgents withdrew. It must be added that Ptolemy gives the latitude and longitude of Siatoutanda ! It may be confessed, however, that it is only too easy to prove that the Italian scholars of the Renaissance were not altogether above deceit with respect to classical authors ; for Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo (Leonardus Aretinus), when he believed he possessed the unique MS. of Procopius's treatise, De bello Italico adversus Gothos gesto, promptly pub- lished it as his own work in A.D. 1470, and enjoyed much credit for some years, when a second MS. of the same work was found, and Leonardus had to hide his head. A curious instance of a supposed original with a romantic story attached to it, may fitly close this series of examples, and will illustrate as well as any other the means for detecting originals and copies. Literary Forgeries 133 Among the Cotton MSS. at the British Museum, is a grant by Eadred, in A.D. 949, of certain lands to the monastery of Reculver in Kent, the body of it as usual being in Latin, and the boundaries of the lands described in Old English. The whole deed and the numerous signatures of attesting witnesses are also, as usual before the fifteenth century, in one and the same handwriting, not autograph. But one of the signatures reads thus : ' Ego Dunstanus indignus abbas rege Eadredo imperante hanc kartulam dictitando composui et propriis digitorum articulis perscripsi' (' I, Dunstan, an unworthy abbot, at King Eadred's command drew up and composed this charter, and wrote it throughout with my oivn finger-joints '). Here we have a most interesting instance of a charter, not only in the words, but from the pen of the great Dunstan, the first in the line of English ecclesiastical statesmen. How much is our interest heightened when we look closely at the indignus of the document ! For beneath the first three letters are clearly visible the traces of abb, first written and then smudged out. So we can imagine the Abbot of Glastonbury, when he wrote out the charter and came to his own name, first writing Ego Dunstanus abb and then, in a sudden access of humility, substituting indignus abbas. What life it seems to put into the parchment, and how near we seem to draw to Dunstan himself! Alas ! Truth is better than romance, however bare and cold that truth may seem to be. The incisive criticism of modern times cuts clean away this 1 34 Books in Manuscript interesting story, by proving that this charter is a copy and not an original. The critic confesses that abb was written and blotted out ; but when he pro- ceeds to read the document he finds the following sentence : ' Unde nobis uictus restat sine dubio certus defuictoque Dominus dixit ' (' From which source there remains to us a livelihood undoubtedly secure . . . the Lord said,' and a quotation from the Gospels follows). But what is defuictoque? It may be doubted whether the solution would ever have been discovered, did there not exist at Canterbury another copy of this charter which gives us the clue. There s. uictu the clause reads ' . . . de quo . . . ,' showing that de quo was written (' about which '), and that then to explain the quo there was written above the word ' s(cilicet) uictu,' which forms what is called a gloss on quo. This gloss the scribe of the British Museum document tried to incorporate in the text, mistaking the f of s(cilicet) for f, and otherwise blundering until the defuictoque was produced ! Now Dunstan could not conceivably have written this monstrous word. But is the Canterbury document in Dunstan's own hand ? No, not even that ; it also is a copy of the original, which itself has no doubt perished. The proof is that, in the Old English boundaries a clause is omitted through homoioteleuton (see p. 63), which Dunstan could not have omitted without being presently corrected. It need hardly be said that the Literary Forgeries 135 accidental omission of indigmis before abbas is not found in the Canterbury deed. It has to be confessed, therefore, that if the work of Dunstan's ' own finger-joints ' does anywhere remain to us, it is not in the charter of Eadred, but in the words inscribed on the picture of Dunstan at the feet of Christ, figured at p. 105 of vol. i. of the new illustrated edition of J. R. Green's Short History of tJie English Peopled This chapter has only attempted to deal with a few typical and famous falsifications, and has deliber- ately passed over an almost countless host, such as the Donation of Constantine (by which the Emperor surrenders important rights to the Bishop of Rome and his successors, and which was thoroughly believed in through the Middle Ages, and mourned over by Dante), the Casket Letters of Mary Queen of Scots (which are still believed in by some historians, and when produced from their silver box and declared to be autograph love-letters of the Queen, formed a weighty part of the evidence against her), the ' E/xwn /3aff/>.//c?j, or Portraiture of His Majesty's [Charles I.'s] Sufferings ' (now ascertained to have been written by Bishop Gauden, though professing to be the King's retrospect of his own life, and intended to cause a revulsion of popular feeling in his favour at his trial, 1 It may be noted that in this edition of Green's History there are a very large number of engraved illustrations from celebrated manu- cripts, and not a few coloured copies of illumination?. 36 Books in Manuscript but accidentally delayed till a few days after his death), and the Poems of Ossian (pretended by Mac- pherson in 1760-63 to be epics translated from the Gaelic, but which it is not wholly fair to class as for- geries, since they appear to be based on the floating traditional poetry of the Western Highlands). But perhaps enough have been described to exhibit the salient features of this class of fraud, the extraordinary ingenuity and industry expended on them, the corre- spondence of the matter falsified with the needs and expectations of the time, the curious complexity of motives which the circumstances of their production evince, motives in which vanity and greed play a large part ; and the almost inevitable detection which, at least in these critical and reflective days, awaits the person who tries to impose on the world a concocted literary composition. Yet it has to be confessed that for the last five years, letters of Mary Queen of Scots, letters of Jacobite leaders, inedited poems of Burns, letters by Sir Walter Scott, and the like, some of which are undoubtedly spurious and many more probably so, have been scattered far and wide by public sale in England and Scotland, having been found, as there seems no reason to doubt, in the secret drawer of an old cabinet where the original forger may have placed them. While this takes place before our eyes, it is premature to say that the book of successful literary fraud is closed. CHAPTER X. TREATMENT AND CATALOGUING OF MANUSCRIPTS. LET us suppose that a private collector has pur- chased a MS. at some sale, that it has just reached him, and that he is inexperienced in the treatment of such volumes. Let us further assume, for the sake of definiteness, that it is one of those very common MSS., of which perhaps a hundred are sold and bought every year in London auctions, lettered outside ' Missale Romanum,' described (it may be) in the catalogue as ' Breviarium,' and in reality a Latin book of Hours (Horce). How should the owner proceed to investigate and treat it ? The natural order of dealing with it is perhaps to consider in turn its contents, its age, its state, and the best way to catalogue or describe it. I. Contents, No MS. written before the invention of printing has a title-page. The volume presented may bear on its first page a rubric beginning, ' Incipit . . .' or ' Incipiunt Hore Beate Marie Virginis ; ' but more usually the title, if there is any, will be found on the last page, in some such form as ' Expliciunt Hore 137 1 38 Books in Manuscript secundum usum Curie Romane, scripte per me Willelmum de Gorham canonicum de Bridlington anno incarnationis dominice MCCCXLVJ. Gracias Deo. Amen.' If these distinctive rubrics fail, how shall we distinguish between the three cardinal kinds of ordinary liturgical books, Missals, Breviaries, and books of Hours ? A Missal, which^ corresponds to the Communion Service of the Church of England, may be detected very quickly by searching for the Canon of the Mass. This is the invariable part of the book, and has not appreciably altered for 1500 years. It begins with the words ' Te igitur,' and this particular "f is hardly ever an ordinary letter, but either treated finely as a capital letter, or interwoven in a splendid picture of the crucifixion, forming itself the cross. Unfortunately, since the leaf containing this illumina- tion was often the finest in the volume, it has occasionally been abstracted ; but words belonging to the service of the Mass can usually be dis- tinguished, while such rubrical words as Introitus, Offertorium, Communio, Post-communio, are proper to a Missal. A Breviary may be said to correspond to a Common Prayer Book with Proper Lessons, omitting the Com- munion Service and the Occasional Offices. It falls into six parts, which ought to be recognisable with or without the rubrics in any ordinary volume : i. The Calendar, with rubrics and tables. 2. A Psalter, with the versicles and responses of the week- Treatment and Cataloguing of MSS 139 day Hours (see below), sometimes with small Offices appended (this is equivalent to, but has never received the title of, Commune de Tempore). 3. Proprium de Tempore, collects and lections for particular Sundays and week-days. 4. Proprium de Sanctis, the same for particular Saints' Days. 5. Commune Sanct- orum, the same for Saints who have no special service assigned to them. 6. Small Offices, such as for dedications, commemoration or burial of the dead, the Hours of the Virgin, etc. Often the mere bulk of the volume will show that it is a Breviary and not a book of Hours ; often its division into two parts, for summer and winter (pars czstivalis, pars hiemalis}. A book of Hours is usually in some form or other the Horae Beatse Marias Virginis. There are two Offices of the Virgin, one, the greater, often found in the latter part of a Breviary ; one, the lesser, usually found in books of Hours. The ordinary composition of this lesser Office, which is properly for the use, not of the priest as such, but of the laity, is as follows, the usual subjects of the accompanying illuminations being enclosed in brackets: I. Calen- dar (emblems or scenes suited to each month). 2. Four lessons from the Gospels (the four evangelists or their emblems), followed by some preliminary prayers. 3. The Hours proper, that is to say, the order of the service for each of the Canonical Hours, each consisting essentially of preparation, hymn, psalms, lections, hymn, canticle, prayers* 140 Books in Manuscript but subject to special lengthening and shortening. The Hours are Matins, ad Matutinas (Annuncia- tion) ; Lauds, ad Laudes (Visitation of Elizabeth) ; Prime, ad Primain (the Nativity) ; Tierce, ad Tertiam (Angels appearing to the Shepherds) ; Sext, ad Sextam (the Magi) ; None, ad Nonaut (Presentation in Temple) ; Vespers, ad Vesperas (Flight into Egypt) ; and Compline, ad Completorium (Coronation or Assumption of the Virgin). The Psalms and more usual prayers, hymns, versicles, etc., are usually only indicated by their first few words. 4. The Penitential part, consisting of the seven Penitential Psalms (David praying, or David and Bathsheba) and a Litany with prayers. 5. The Office for the Dead, or strictly the choir-service part of the Office, the actual Mass being in the Missal. This choir-service consisted of special vespers and matins, called respectively from the first words of the antiphons to the first Psalm, ' Placebo ' and ' Dirige ' (funeral, day of judgment, etc.). 6. Private and miscellaneous prayers. This is the simplest analysis and the commonest order of a book of Hours, which corresponds to the Offices for Morning and Evening Prayer in the Church of England. Sometimes other Hours are found inserted after the fourth part, such as Hours of the Holy Cross, Horcz Sanct. 1217. Churchwardens' Accounts (from the fifteenth century) and Parish Registers (from A.D. 1538, or more usually from 1558, but often neglected or lost 1 ) afford endless material for the history of villages, manors, and families. All these, and many other classes which might be mentioned, are public, or have a public side ; let us now turn to those which may, by comparison, be termed private. 2. Private or Personal Records. There are four conspicuous kinds of document which may be put under this head, deeds or agree- ments, wills, visitations of heralds, and manor- or court-rolls. A deed by which two parties agree about the dis- posal of something of value is the most universal document known, and in its form, so far as the matter will allow, fairly constant. It generally consists of the following eleven parts, usually before the Refor- 1 The Census returns for 1831 contain a list of all the parish registers then existing. Public and Private Records 157 mation written in Latin, which put together make up a complete typical deed : 1. Introduction. Sciant prcesentes ct futuri quod ego (or, if a Royal grant, Ilenricus Dei gratia rex Anglise Hibernire et Francia: omnibus ad quos prcesentes literse pervenerint salutem : noveritis quod nos . . . , or the like). 2. Grantor's name. Robertus Godiferc. 3. Act of gift. Dedi et concessi et hac prasenti chart a mea confirmavi. 4. Grantee's name. Henrico de La Birch et luredibtis suis. 5. The thing granted. Unatn peciam terra (often with long and accurate description of the property, especially with reference to adjacent pro- perties). 6. Quality of gift (usually ungrammatical). Habendum et tenendum predictain pedant term cum omnibus pertinentiis suis pr&dicto Henrico Hbcre quiet e bene et pace imperpetuum. 7. Consideration, rent, etc. Reddendo inde mihi et heredibus meis ununi oboluni redJUns annuatim die Luna; proximo post festum sancti Michattts. 8. Warranty. Et ego Robertus et heredes met warrantizabiinus predictain peciam terra: contra omnes homines. 9. Sealing. In cujus rei testimonium tarn sigillum meum quam sigillum pradicti Henrici huic scripto indentato alternatim stint appensa. 10. Witnesses. His testibus, Radulpho de Woodstock, Rogero de Toeni, Hugone filio Roberti cum multis aliis. 158 Books in Manuscript n. Date. Datum die Veneris proximo post dominicam Quasimodo^ anno regni Regis Henricl post conquestum tertii septimo. From this type variations of course occur, accord- ing as the deed is a certificate or notice of a fact, a confirmation (in which the grant or grants confirmed are often quoted at full length, preceded by the words ' inspeximus chartam in haec verba ' [' we have seen a charter in these terms '], whence the name ' inspeximus ' applied to confirmations), a covenant in which both parties have duties to perform, an exchange, a final concord (see p. -154), a letter of attorney (appointing an agent to act on behalf of one party), a writing obligatory (recording a duty or debt, and binding the debtor to fulfil his obligation under penalty), a release (giving up a right), or other forms known to lawyers. An exemplification means simply an official copy of a deed. Some other common terms met with in the description of deeds are Feoffment or InfeofTment (putting a person in possession of a thing), grants in Frankalmoigne (donations in francam elyinosinam, ' as free alms/ 1 Sundays were often designated by the first word or words of the introit with which the Mass began on that day, as Adte levavi (Advent Sunday), Oculi (the third Sunday in Lent), and others. Qnasimodc was the first Sunday after Easter, the introit beginning ' Quasi mode geniti infantes' (i Pet. ii. 2). The date of this (fictitious) deed would therefore be Friday, May 5, 1223. As an example of the nicety some- times required in computing a date, the following may be adduced : ' Datum die Lunas proximo ante Nativitatem Sancti Johannis Baptists anno regni Regis Ricardi post conquestum secundi secundo : ' the solution of which will be given in the index under Date. Public and Private Records 159 usually to a religious house), indentures (when both the grantor's copy of a deed with the grantee's seal and the grantee's copy with the grantor's seal, were ^^^MHMMM^J written on one piece of parchment, thus : o and a curved or jagged line was cut along the line of dots, so that the two pieces could be for ever identi- fied as fitting precisely into each other, when brought together). In ancient times personal signature was not re- quired, and even the sign of the cross, by which before the Conquest the signatories attested their presence, was affixed by the scribe of the whole deed ; in fact, not till the fifteenth century do we: expect to find actual autographs of witnesses. In England after the Conquest we do not expect to find deeds dated until after A. I). 1290; but, on the other hand, undated ones after 1320 are hardly found at all. Wills are among the most authentic materials of personal history, often abounding in precise informa- tion of relationships, age, and condition. Though private documents, they have from early times been deposited or enrolled in various public offices, such as those of the Prerogative Courts of Canterbury and York. The former collection is now- at Somerset House in London, and extends back to the year 1383 ; the York wills go back to 1389 ; but there arc numerous lesser offices. Often the old registers of a town contain early wills enrolled at the desire of the 160 Books in Manuscript testator, in order to preserve the terms of the will from any tampering or possible loss. Heraldic Visitations, which were held once in every generation in each county from 1530 to 1687, were due to the jealousy with which the right to bear arms was safeguarded. The Heralds' College or College of Arms was specially instituted to preserve this privilege, and to register all recent changes in the line of descent of families. The Visitations were personally conducted by heralds, and every change in or addition to pedigrees was investigated by refer- ence to documents or by evidence on oath. The results were finally copied out and certified and sent up to the College of Arms, and still present the most certain pedigrees which we possess. They are classed with private records on account of their subject- matter. One very interesting class of documents remains, the Court Rolls of a manor. The descent of the manor is usually the key to the history of a parish or village ; and where the Court Rolls are preserved, we have as clear a picture as can be obtained of the inner life and changes of a district. It is important to bear in mind that there were two distinct Courts of law which were held within a manor. The first was the Court Lect, the King's Court, properly held by the Sheriff as representing the king, but usually allowed to be held by the tenants on payment of a sum called the Certum Let?e. This Court was for public offences against Public and Private Records 1 6 1 the commonwealth, for felonies, and the like. The other Court was the Court Baron (Curia Baronis), or Court of the Lord of the Manor. This was local, and in it the customs of the particular manor prevailed ; the causes tried in it were offences against the said customs, personal squabbles, actions for non-payment of debts, for assault, for diverting roads, polluting streams, allowing cattle to trespass, and the number- less bickerings which prevent life from stagnating in rural districts. The jury were freemen from the manor Itself, or at least from the tithing (decenna, whence their name of decennarii, tithing-men) within which the manor might be, and were presided over by the Steward of the Lord. The jury ' presented ' certain facts, which were inquired into, and punish- ment meted out. Most amusing as well as interesting these glimpses of real life are to an observant eye ; the quaint solemnity of the proceedings, the simple offences, the fresh-air kind of justice done, the world- old yet modern kinds of men and women concerned. Take, for instance, an ordinary (translated) entry from a Court Roll of Cressingham in A.D. 1329 : (Presentment) of Thomas Buteler for rescue from the servant of Alexander Nally of one pig taken in the corn of Alexander Nally. Of Alice Brun because she did not allow the ale-tasters to do their duty. Of Peter le Miller for a hue and cry justly raised upon him by the wife of William le Fuller. (The fines were 6cl., ad., and 6d. respectively.) Human nature is reconisable as much in the 1 62 Books in Manuscript matter of Essonia (excuses) for not coming to take part in the Court, as in any other part of these records. For there were five recognised excuses i. Ultra mare, ' I have gone abroad ;' 2. De Terra Sancta, ' I am on my way to the Holy Land ;' 3. De malo veniendi, ' I can't manage to come ; ' this was called the ' common excuse ; ' 4. De malo lecti, ' I am confined to my bed ;' and 5. De servitio Regis, ' the king requires my services.' It is a thousand pities that more care has not been and is not taken of Court Rolls. Few have been printed, and countless numbers have been destroyed from inability on the part of their owners to see the importance of them. Both they and parish registers should be preserved with all possible care. 'Hie locus est metx : liber explicit, atque valete. ' APPENDIX A. PUBLIC LIBRARIES WHICH CONTAIN MORE THAN FOUR THOUSAND MANUSCRIPTS. (Extracted, by the kind permission of the publisher and surviving author, from the list given in the article on ' Libraries ' in the Encyclo- pedia Britannica (1882), written by H. R. Tedder and E. C. Thomas. Libraries which possessed 3500 MSS. in 1882 may be estimated to contain 4000 now. Entries marked with an asterisk have been brought up to date. ) GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND. Cambridge University Library, . 5,723 London British Museum, . . 52,000* (and 162,000* charters). London India Office, Oxford- Bodleian Library, . 31,000* AUSTRO-HUNGARY. Buda-Pest.li, . . . 18,000* Cracow, . . .4,781 1'rng Ivonigl. Bibliothek, . 3,818 Vienna Konigl. Bibliothek. . 20,000 BELGIUM. Brussels. . 30,000 DENMARK. Copenhagen Kongelige Bibliothek, . 18,000 Univ. Bibliothek, . . 4000 164 Books in Manuscript FRANCE. Grenoble, . . . 7,000 | Paris- Orleans, .... 9,000* j Bibliotheque Mazarine, . 6,000 Paris ,, Nationale, . 80,000 Bibliotheque del' Arsenal, 8,500* ': GERMANY. Berlin | Heidelberg, . . . 4.700 Konigl. Bibliothek, . 1 6,000 I Leipzig Breslau, .... 4,000 | Univ. Bibliothek, . . 4,000 Dresden, .... 6,500 | Munich, .... 26,000 Gottingen, . . . 4,800 Gotha, .... 6,000 Hamburg, . . . 5,500 i Wolfenbiittel, . . . 9,000 Hanover, . . . 4,000 Stuttgart Konigl. Bibliothek, . 3,800 HOLLAND. The Hague, . . . 4,000 Leyden, .... 4,950 ITALY. Bologna, .... 6,000 Palermo Florence Biblioteca Nazionale, . 12,000 Biblioteca Nazionale, . 15,000 \ Parma, .... 4,500* ,, Riccardiana, 3,800* Rome Libreria Medico - Lau- Biblioteca Barberina, . 7,000 renziana, . 7,000* . ,, Vaticana, . 25,600" Milan ,, Vittorio-Em- Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 8, 100 I manuele, . 5,000 ., Nazionale, . 3,646 ! Siena, .... 4,500" Naples Biblioteca Nazionale. . 8,000 Venice- Biblioteca Marciana, . 9,036 PORTUGAL. Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional, . 9,415 ,, Real, . . 3,800* Appendix A. 165 RUSSIA. Moscow, .... 5,000 St. Petersburg Imperial Library, . . 26,000 SPAIN. Escorial, . . . .4,611 Madrid Biblioteca Nacional, . 25,000* SWEDEN. Stockholm, . 8,000 | Upsala, . 10,000 SWITZERLAND. Bale Univ. Bibliothek, . . 4,000 THE EAST. Benares, .... 4,000* Calcutta Royal Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, . . . 9,500 Tanjur, .... 18,000 APPENDIX B. LIST OF PRINTED CATALOGUES OF MANUSCRIPTS IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY AT OXFORD, THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, ETC. A. BRITISH MUSEUM (see p. 80). i. SLOANE (1753). A catalogue of the manuscripts preserved in the British Museum hitherto undescribed . . . including the collections of Sir Hans Sloane, Bart, the Rev. Thomas Birch, D.D., and about five hundred volumes . . . [acquired] at various times. ... By Samuel Ayscough. . . . 2 vols. : Lond. 1782, 4to. This work is arranged by subjects, so that the description of a miscellaneous MS. is to be found in several different places, but there is an index of pressmarks and of names. The MSS. are numbered 1-5017, of which 1-4100 are Sloane; 4101-4478 are Birch ; the rest are chiefly Madox, Rymer, Milles, and Bankes MSS. Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum bibliothecae Sloanianae. Lond. [about 1841], fol. This is an incomplete unpublished book without title-page, and dealing only with MSS. Sloane 1-1091, but is continued to No. 4014 in 9 'auto graphed ' folio volumes, not published. See below, ADDITIONAL MSS. Appendix J3. 167 2. COTTON (1753). A catalogue of the manuscripts in the Cottonian Library . . . [86 1 vols.]. Lond. 1802, fol. By J. Planta. An appendix to this catalogue forms part of Casley's catalogue, see No. 4 below (PP- 3*3-45 ) 3. HARLEIAN (1753). A catalogue of the Harleian manuscripts . . . [7639 vols.]. 4 vols. : Lond. 1808-12, fol. This was begun by Humphrey Wanley (1-2407), who died in 1726, and was continued by Casley (2408-5709), Hocker (5710-7355), F. Douce, and others, and edited by the Rev. R. Nares ; the index is by the Rev. T. H. Home. 4. OLD ROYAL COLLECTION (1757). A catalogue of the manuscripts of the King's Library. ... By David Casley . . . [nearly 2000 vols.]. Lond. 1734, 4to. 5. LANSDOWNE (1807). A catalogue of the Lansdowne manuscripts . . . [1245 vols.]. Lond. 1819, fol. This was largely by Francis Douce, and com- pleted and edited by Sir Henry Ellis. 6. HARGRAVE (1813). A catalogue of manuscripts formerly in the possession of Francis Hargrave, Esq. . . . [499 vols.]. Lond. iSiS, 4to. This was by Sir Henry Ellis. 7. BURNEY (1818). Catalogue of manuscripts in the British Museum. New Series. Vol. i. Part i. The Arundel manu- 1 68 Books in Manuscript scripts [550 vols.J. Part 2. The Burney manu- scripts [524 vols.]. Part 3. Index. Lond. 1840, fol. By the Rev. J. Forshall. 8. KING'S (OR NEW ROYAL) COLLECTION (1828) [446 vols.]. Of this there is no printed or published catalogue, but a manuscript one available to readers at the Museum. 9. EGERTON (1825), see ADDITIONAL MSS. 10. ARUNDEL (1831), see No. 7 (BURNEY): the Arundel catalogue was issued in 1834, but the index not till 1840. 11. ADDITIONAL MSS. This is the series in which all acquisitions are numbered if they are not sufficiently numerous or important to form a separate collection by themselves. 1-5017 have been mentioned above under Sloane. 5018-5027, 5214-5308 are also Sloane MSS.; and for these and all others between 5028 and about 7084, and for 4324- 4326 B, there is only a catalogue in twenty-three folio volumes of manuscript kept in the Museum. For index, see below. About 784-S2i9 are contained (without any numbers assigned) in the three Annual Lists of Donations and Bequests, 1828-30, published in 1830 and 1831, 8vo ; but none of the purchased MSS. are here catalogued, though included in the numbering. 8220-8891, 8901 are in the ' List of Additions, 1831 ' (Lond. 1833, Svo). 8892-8900, 8902 to about 9344, are in the 'List . . . 1832' (Lond. 1834, Svo). 9346 to about 9707, with some earlier, are in the ' List . . . 1833' (Lond. 1835, Svo). 9708 to about 9814 are in the ' List . . . 1834' (Lond. 1837, Svo). 9821 to about 10,018 are in the ' List . . . 1835 ' (Lond. 1839, Svo). At this point comes in the ' Index to the Additional Manu- Appendix B. 169 scripts, with those of the Egerton Collection . . . acquired in the years 1783-1835' (Lond. 1849, fol.). This covers all the non-Oriental MSS. from 5018 to 10,018, but in- cludes Hebrew. It is a rare volume, since by an error only 100 copies were printed. 10,019-1 1,748 with a few earlier are in the ' List of Additions to the Manuscripts . . . 1836-1840' (Lond. 1843, 8vo), with index. 11,749-15,667 are in the 'Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts . . . 1841-1845' (Lond. 1850, 8vo), with index. 15,668-17,277 are in the similar 'Catalogue . . . 1846-1847' (Lond. 1864, 8vo), with index. 17,278-19,719 are in the 'Catalogue . . . 1848-1853' (Lond. 1868, 8vo), with index. 19,720-24,026 are in the 'Catalogue . . . 1854-1860' (Lond. 1875, 8vo). 24,027-29,909 are in the ' Catalogue . . . 1854-1875, vol. ii.' (Lond. 1877, 8vo). An 'Index to the Catalogue. . . 1854-1875,' was published in 1880. 29,910-31,896 are in the 'Catalogue . . . 1876-1881 ' (Lond. 1882, 8vo), with index. 31,897-33,344 are in the 'Catalogue . . . 1882-1887' (Lond. 1889, Svo), with index. In almost all of the above catalogues are to be found gradually described (i) The series of Egerton MSS. 1-607, with additions (purchased with funds left by the Earl of Bridgewater) both of Egerton MSS. up to No. 2678, and of Egerton Charters and Rolls up to 584 ; (2) Additional Charters and Rolls 1-32,899; (3) Seals; (4) Papyri, 1-120. 12. ASHBURNHAM (1883). Catalogue of the manuscripts in the Stowe Collection. ... By Mr. R. R. Knowles (reprinted from the Report of Royal Commission on Historical Manu- scripts.) Appendix No. 2 of Papers relating to the Pur- chase of the Stowe Collection by Her Majesty's Government, Lond. 1883, fol. Not official. 170 Books in Manuscript Besides the above, there are catalogues by subjects, as follows (see also Birch> p. 178) : Description of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum, Part I. (By J. Forshall.) Lond. 1839, 4to. This includes 44 papyri. Catalogue of the manuscript music . . . [with index]. Lond. 1842, 8vo. Catalogue of the manuscript maps, charts, and plans, and of the topographical drawings. . . . (By John Holmes.) Vols. 1-2, Lond. 1844, 8vo. This contains Great Britain, Ireland, and France only. Catalogo dos Manuscriptos portuguezes existentes no Museu Britannico . . . Por Frederico Francisco de La Figaniere . . . [with index]. Lisboa, 1853, 8vo. Not official. Facsimiles of Ancient Charters in the British Museum. 4 vols., Lond. 1873-78, fol. (vol. i. smaller). Deutsche Handschriften aus dem Britischen Museum. In Ausztigen herausgegeben von Dr. Jacob Beech- told Schaffhausen, 1873, Svo. This does not pretend to be a complete collec- tion, and is not an official publication. Catalogue of the manuscripts in the Spanish language. ... By Don Pascual de Gayangos. Vols. 1-4, Lond. 1875-93, Svo. This has at present no index, but is arranged by subjects. Appendix B. 171 Catalogue of Ancient manuscripts in the British Museum. Part I. Greek [with facsimiles]. Lond. 1 88 1, fol. Part. II. Latin [with facsimiles]. Lond. 1884, fol. Catalogue of Romances in the department of manu- scripts. . . . By H. L. I). Ward. . . . Vols. 1-2, Lond. 1883-93, Notes sur les Manuscrits grecs du British Museum, par H. Omont (Extrait de la Bibliothcque de VEcole des Chartes, t. xlv.). Paris, 1884, 8vo. This gives a complete list of the references of the 760 Greek MSS. in the Museum, with notes on the scribes. Not official. Alessandro Palma di Cesnola, Catalogo di Manos- critti italiani esistenti nel Museo Britannico. . . . Torino, 1890, 8vo. With no index, but arranged by subjects. Not official. Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum, edited by F. G. Kenyon. Lond. 1893, 4to, & vol. of facsimiles, fol. B. BODLEIAN LIBRARY (see p. 84). Catalog! librorum manuscriptorum Anglian et Hibernian in unum collecti cum indice alphabetico. Oxonias, e Theatro Sheldoniano, 1697, fol. This is the 'Old Catalogue,' chiefly edited by Dr. Edward Bernard. The ist part of vol. i., about two- fifths of the whole, deals with the MSS. in the Bodleian ; part 2, MSS. in Oxford Colleges ; part 3, MSS. in some Cambridge Colleges and the University Library ; vol. 172 Books in Manuscript ii., part i, catalogues MSS. in Cathedral Libraries and private hands; part 2, Irish collections. Each part has a separate index. The Bodleian collections here found, and still not elsewhere fully described in print, are Bodley, Selden, e Musaeo, James, Fairfax, Hatton, Leland, Junius, Marshall, Barlow, Dugdale, Wood, and Fell. Unfortunately no indication of the age of a MS. is given, but the work is by no means superseded. (Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Orientalium . . . pars i. ; a J. Uri (Oxf. 1788, fol.); partis ii. vol. i ab A. Nicoll (Oxf. 1821, fol.); partis ii. vol. 2 ab E. B. Pusey (Oxf. 1835, fol.). 2. Catalogus MSS. . . . E. D. Clarke . . . pars i. (Oxf. 1812, 4to) ; pars 2 ab A. Nicoll (Oxf. 1814, 4to). 3. Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum et impressorum cum notis MSS. olim D'Orvillianorum . . . (Oxf. 1806, 4 to). 4. Catalogus MSS. Borealium prascipue Islandicae originis, a Finno Magnaeo Islando (Oxf. 1832, 410). 5. Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliotheoe Bod- leianas ('The Quarto Series') : Pars i. Codices Grasci, ab H. O. Coxe (Oxf. 1853, 4to). This includes also the Adversaria of Casaubon, Grabe, Langbaine, and St. Amanci. ,, ii. Codices Laudiani, ab H. O. Coxe, 2 fasciculi (Oxf. 1858-85, 4to). ,, iii. Codices Groeci et Latini Canoniciani, ab H. O. Coxe (Oxf. 1854, 4to). ,, iv. Codices T. Tanned, ab A. Hackman (Oxf. 1860, 4to). ., v. Codicum R. Rawlinson (fasc. i) classes duce priores, (fasc. 2) classis tertia cum indice trium classium, (fasc. 3) classis quarta 1-860, a Gul. D. Macray (Oxf. 1862-93, 410). ,, vi. (Syriac, 1864.) .. vii. (Aethiopic, 1848.) ., viii. (Sanskrit, 1859-64.) ., ix. Codices Digbeiani, a Gul. D. Macray (Oxf. 1883, 4to) Appendix B. 173 Pars x. Catalogue of the manuscripts bequeathed to the University by Elias Ashmole. By W. II. Black, with index by W. I). Macray (Oxf. 1845-67, 4to). ,, xi. Catalogo di codici MSS. Canoniciani Italic!, com- pilato dal Conte A. Mortara (Oxf. 1864, 4to). xii. (Hebrew, 1886.) ,, xiii. (Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, Rushtu, part I, 1889.) 6. Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, vols. 1-3, 1523- 1657. By O. Ogle, W. H. Bliss, and W. D. Macray (Oxf. 1869-76, 8vo). Manuscripts are also catalogued in the Gough (1841), Malone (1835), and Douce (1840) catalogues, and in minor books which cannot be here enumerated. A summary catalogue of all the Western manuscripts not included in the quarto series is in preparation, C. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY (see p. 86). Catalogue of the manuscripts (non-Oriental, but includ- ing printed books with manuscript notes, with indexes), 7 vols. (i.-v., index, adversaria), Camb. 1856-67, Svo. D. COLLEGE LIBRARIES OF OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. i . Oxford. Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum qui in Collegiis Aulisque Oxoniensibus hodie adservantur. Confecit H. O. Coxe (2 vols. : Oxf. 1852, 4to). This catalogue omits the Christ Church and Pem- broke manuscripts. A supplement to the Corpus Catalogue was issued in 1887. Some copies omit the All Souls' MSS. Catalogus codicum MSS. qui in bibliotheca Aedis Christi apud Oxonienses adservantur. Curavit G. W. Kitchin (Oxf. 1867, 4to). The MSS. both of the Chapter and of the House are 1 74 Books in Manuscript included. For Pembroke College, Haenel's Catalog! librorum manuscriptorum (Leipzig, 1830, 4to) must be used. 2. Cambridge. Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum quos Collegio Cor- poris Christi legavit Matthseus Parker archiepiscopus Cantuariensis. Edidit Jacobus Nasmyth (Camb. 1777, 4 to). A descriptive catalogue of the manuscripts and scarce books in the library of St. John's College, by the Rev. M. Cowie, 2 parts (part of the Camb. Antiqu. Society's publications; Camb. 1842-3, 4to). A catalogue of the manuscripts in the library of Gonville and Caius College, by the Rev. J. J. Smith (Camb. 1849, Svo). For Trinity Hall, Christ's, Clare, and Magdalene, Haenel's Catalog! librorum manuscriptorum (Leipzig, 1830, 4to) may be referred to ; for Emmanuel, Trinity, Trinity Hall, Pembroke, Jesus, King's, Peterhouse, and Sidney, the old catalogue of 1697 (see above, p. 171) must still be used. E. PHILLIPPS LIBRARY. Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum in bibliotheca D. Thomas Phillipps, Bart. (Middlehill and Cheltenham, i837-(7i), fol. ; this comprises MSS. i to about 30,000, with rough indexes to MSS. 1-11,506 only. Not pub- lished and unfinished, but accessible in large libraries. The first 3000 or so are in Haenel's Catalogi, as above). APPENDIX C. SOME BOOKS USEFUL FOR THE STUDY OF MANUSCRIPTS. (The titles are not in all cases taken from the books themselves, but are sufficiently accurate for the present purpose. Expensive works are marked with an asterisk at the beginning of the title, and those which can be obtained for less than los. by an asterisk at the end. The lists within each section are arranged roughly in order of present utility.) i. OLD WRITING IN GENERAL. Encyclopaedia Britannica, art. Palaeography, by E. Maunde Thompson,* 1885, 4to. Manual of Greek and Roman Palaeography, by E. Maunde Thompson,* (International Scientific Series), 1893, 8vo. Berger, P. : Histoire de' 1'Ecriture dans 1'antiquite, 2nd ed. 1892, 4to. Silvestre, J. B. : Historical and descriptive text and introduction to his Universal Palaeography, by Champollion-Figeac and Aime Champollion, trans- lated and edited by Sir F. Madden, 2 vols. 1849, 8vo. Astle, Thomas : The Origin and Progress of Writing, 2nd ed. 1803, fol., or (a simple reissue) 1873, with facsimiles. Taylor, Isaac : The Alphabet, 2 vols. 1883, 8vo. (a) Greek Writing. Gardthausen. V. : Griechische Palaographie, 1879, 176 Books in Manuscript 8vo ; with which may be obtained Lehmann's Tachygraphischen Abkiirzungen der griechischen Handschriften,* 1880, 8vo. Wattenbach, W. : Anleitung zur griechischen Palao- graphie,* 2nd ed. 1877, 410, with separate fac- similes. Montfaucon, Bern.: Pateographia Grseca, 1708, fol. The old and classical work on the subject, with facsimiles. (b] Latin Writing. Chassant, Alphonse : Dictionnaire des Abrevia- tions,* 4th ed. 1876, or a later edition, 8vo. This deals with Latin and French, and the in- troduction makes it hardly necessary to purchase the same author's Pal'eographic des Chartes* 7th ed. 1876, Svo. Wattenbach, W. : Anleitung zur lateinischen Palao- graphie,* 4th ed. 1886, 4to. Prou, M. : Manuel de Paleographie, suivi d'un Dictionnaire des Abreviations, avec 23 facsimile's (1890), Svo. The old classical works on the subject, not really superseded, are Mabillon's De Re Diplomatica libri vi., 1681 or 1709, fol., with supplement, 1704, fol. ; or 1789, 2 vols. fol. ; with facsimiles : (Toustain and Tassin's) * Nouveau Traite de Diplomatique, 6 vols. 1750-65, 410, with fac- similes ; and Kopp's Tachygraphia veterum, 2 vols. 1817, 4to, especially dealing with Latin shorthand (Tironian notes). For Latin contractions, besides Chassant and Kopp above, Walther's Lexicon Diplomaticum, 1 745-47, or 1752, or 1756, fol. ; C. Trice Martin's Record Interpreter, 1892, Svo; and lists in vol. iv. of the Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense (Rolls Appendix C. 177 series), 1878, 8vo, and vol. iii. of the Pipe Roll Society's publications, 1884, 8vo, may be used. And for mediaeval Latin, * Du Cange's Glos- sarium ad Scriptores mediae et infimae Latini- tatis (best ed. 10 vols. 1883-87, 4to), or Maigne d'Arnis's one volume abridgment of it (1866, Svo), are the best books; and for English law terms in Latin, Norman-French, or English, CowelPs Law Dictionary (best ed. 1727, fol.). (c) For old English legal deeds in Court-hand, whether in Latin or English, almost the only manual available is C. Trice Martin's ed. of Wright's Court -hand Restored, gth ed. 1879, 4to, with facsimiles. Madox's Formulare Anglicanum (Lond. 1702, fol.) gives numberless specimens of deeds of all kinds. 2. SCRIBES AND THE PRODUCTION OF BOOKS. Birt, Theodor: Das antike Buchwesen, 1882, Svo. Wattenbach, W. : Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter, 2nd ed. 1875, Svo. Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy's Introduction in the third volume of his Descriptive Catalogue of Materials re- lating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland (Rolls series), 1871, Svo; Richard de Bury's Philo- biblon, the first book on the love of books, finished in 1344 (best ed. by Prof. A. F. West for the Grolier Club at New York, 3 vols. 1889, sm. 4to; next best by E. C. Thomas,* Lond. 1888, Svo); F. S. Merry- weather's Bibliomania in the Middle Ages,* 1849, Svo ; Isaac Taylor's History of the Transmission of Ancient Books to Modern Times,* 1875, Svo; and S. R. Maitland's Dark Ages, 2nd ed. 1845, 8vo, may be consulted. There is no manual of Textual Criticism ; but for the study of the New Testament from this point of view M 178 Books in Manuscript the handbooks of Scrivener (1883), Hammond* (1890), or, if the student can accept their theory, Westcott and Hort (1885), are available among others ; and Madvig's De Arte Coniecturali in vol. i. of his Adversaria Critica (1871) is of value. 3. ILLUMINATIONS AND FACSIMILES. (a) Works on Illuminations. Middleton, J. H. : Illuminated Manuscripts in classical and mediaeval times, 1892, 8vo. Tymms, W. R., and M. D. Wyatt : The Art of Illuminating, 1860, 4to. Denis, F. : Histoire de 1'Ornementations des Manu- scrits, 1879, Svo. Bradley, J. W. : A Dictionary of Miniaturists, 3 vols. 1887-89, 8vo. Shaw, Henry: The Art of Illumination, 1870, 4to. Birch, W. de G., and H. Jenner : Early Drawings and Illuminations in the British Museum, 1879, 8vo ; a long list arranged by subjects, with in- troduction. Searle, W. G. : The Illuminated Manuscripts in the library of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cam- bridge, catalogued, with introduction, 1876, 8vo. There is a group of French books which treat the subject pleasantly but lightly, by Lecoy de La Marche* (1884, 8vo), Molinier* (1892, 8vo) ; and, on a larger scale, Labitte (1893, 8vo). Mrs. Merrifield collected and edited several old treatises on the technical side of illumina- tion (2 vols. 1849, Svo). (/?) Works chiefly consisting of coloured Facsimiles of Illuminations. *Bastard, Count P. Auguste de : Peintures et Ornements des Manuscrits, 1835-83, fol. This Appendix C. 179 is the finest work on illuminations in existence, but is far beyond the means of ordinary students. Special copies have special additions. *Silvestre, J. B. : Universal Palaeography, or Fac- similes of Writings of all nations and periods, translated and edited by Sir F. Madden, 2 vols. 1850, fol. See above, p. 175. A selection entitled Pal&ographical Album, with 72 plates, has been issued lately. *Westwood, J. O. : Palnsographia Sacra Pictoria, n.d. 4to, with valuable descriptions of fine illuminated Biblical MSS. in many languages. * Illuminated Illustrations of the Bible, 1846, 4to. * Miniatures and Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish Manuscripts, 1868, fol. : a splendid work, and accompanied by valuable descriptions of the manuscripts. Shaw, Henry : Illuminated Ornaments selected from Manuscripts and early printed books, 1833, fol. (c) Works chiefly consisting of uncolonrcd Facsimiles of Writing and Illumination. (See also the list of British Museum Catalogues, above, p. 171.) *The Palagographical Society's publications, 1873- 1892, fol. The second series is approaching its end, and brings the total number of autotype plates of Greek and Latin manuscripts to over 45- Wattenbach, W. : Scripturse Grrecse Specimina, 1883, 4 to. Wattenbach, W,, and A. von Velsen : Exempla codicum Grsecorum litteris minusculis scrip- torum, 1878, 4to. i So Books in Manuscript Zangemeister, C., and W. Wattenbach : Exempla codicum Latinorum litteris maiusculis Scrip- torum, 1876-79, 4to. Arndt, W. : Schrift-tafeln, 2 parts, 1874-78, 4to. Delisle, Leopold : Le Cabinet des Manuscrits de la Bibliotheque Nationale (the plates can be obtained separately, 1881, but the whole work is in 4 quarto volumes, 1868-81). Ellis, Robinson : Facsimiles from Latin MSS. in the Bodleian Library,* 2 series, 1885-91, 4to. The series contains 12 and 20 plates respect- ively. ^Facsimiles of National Manuscripts of England (4 vols. 1865-68, 4to), Ireland (4 vols. in 5, 1874-84, 4to), and Scotland (3 vols. 1867-71, 4 to). Skeat, Prof. W. W. : Twelve Facsimiles of Old English Manuscripts,* 1892, 4to. Appendix to Reports from the Commissioners on the Public Records (1820), fol. 86 plates from the Public Records. For the study of autographs, the best book is Scott and Davey's Guide to the Collector of Historical Documents, 1891, 4to; which contains a care- ful index to printed sets of Facsimiles of auto- graphs in 143 printed works, and includes a reproduction of part of Wright's Court -hand Restored. 4. LIBRARIES AND COLLECTORS. Encyclopaedia Britannica, art. Libraries, by H. R. Appendix C. 181 Tedder and E. C. Thomas,* 1882, 410. This contains a valuable bibliography, which could be brought up to date by consulting the American Library Journal, and the Journal of the Library Association of the United Kingdom, at present the Library. Edwards, Edward : Memoirs of Libraries, 2 vols. 1859, 8vo. Libraries and Founders of Libraries, 1864, 8vo. The fourth book of Edwards's Free Town Libraries (1869, Svo) is ' Historical Notices of Book Col- lectors,' and Mr. Quaritch has started a valuable collection of similar notes ; see also Elton's volume in this series. 5. RECORDS. Sims, Richard : A Manual for the genealogist (the three issues from 1861 on are practically identical). Phillimore, W. P. W. : How to write the History of a Family,* 2nd ed., 1888, Svo. Rye, Walter: Records and Record Searching,* 1888, Svo. Cox, J. C. : How to write the History of a Parish/' 1879, Svo. INDEX. /ETHELWOLD, Benedictional of, > /Ethiopic, 72. Alcuin, 27, 29, 32, 54 ; his Bible, 101. Alexandria, 75. Alexandrinus, Codex, 73) 81. Alphabet, history of the, 20. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 102. Apostolic Canons and Constitu- tions, 117. Archetype, 60. Aristotle, 75. Armarius, 35. Armenian, 72. Arrian, 60. Arundel MSS., Si, 83. Ashburnham MSS., 52, 83. Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, 21, 86, 92. Augustine Gospels, 28. Autographs, 128. BARK, writing on, 6. Barnabas, Epistle of, 98. BarocciMSS., 85. Bedford Hours, see Plate II. (p. i) and description. Benedictional of /Ethelwold, 89. Bentley, Dr. Richard, Si, 115. Beowulf, 104. Beza, Theodoras, 73. Bible, the word, 9 ; Biblical MSS., 72, 96, 102 ; Old Testa- ment, 41, 52, 53, 90, 96, 1 10, in ; New Testament, 53, 72, 99, 100. Binding, 49, 143 ; cost of, 42. Bodleian Library at Oxford, ac- count of, 84 ; MSS., App. A, B ; (Arrian), 60; (Augustine Gos- pels), 28 ; (Caedmon), 105 ; (Laudian Chronicle), 105 ; (St. Margaret's Gospel-Book), 107 ; catalogues, App. B. Bodley, Sir Thomas, 84. Bohun, Humphrey de, no. Book, the word, 6 ; see chap. i. Book-hand, 24, 25. Books on writing, etc., see App. C. Book-worms, 144. Boustrophedon t 125 n. Boyle and Bentley controversy, 116. Breviary, 138. British Museum in London, account of, 80 ; collections. 80-83 ; MSS., 125, App. A ; (Ashburnham Pentateuch), 53 ; (Beowulf), 104 ; (clay tablets), 75 ; (Codex Alexandrinus), 73; Si ; (Cottonian Genesis), 96 ; (Dunstan Charter), 133; Hy- perides), 7; (Ingulphus), 120; (Melissencla Psalter). 41 ; (Old English Chronicle), 103; (double 1 84 Books in Manuscript palimpsest), 71 n. ; (Rosetta stone), 5 ; catalogues, App. B. Bulls, Pontifical, n. Burney MSS., 83. Bury, Bp. Richard de, 77. Byzantine ornamentation, 52, 54, 1 08. CADMUS, legend of, 22. Caedmon, 105 ; Plate VIII. (p. 106), description. Cambridge University Library, account of, 86 ; mentioned, 90 ; MSS., App. A (Codex Bezre), 73; CollegeMSS., 87 ; (Corpus), 28, 103 ; catalogues, App, B. Canonici MSS., 86. Canons, Ecclesiastical, 118. Canons of criticism, 65. Capitals, 25 ; similarity of ancient and modern, 30. Carolingian minuscule, 27. Carte papers, 85. Casket Letters, 135. Cataloguing MSS., 145. Cathach Psalter, 53. Catullus, 2, 62. Chain-lines, 15. Chalcis in Eubcea, 22. Charles the Great, 27, 54, 102. Charta, 8; bombycinr., II. Chasles, M., 129. Chatterton, Thomas, 114, 120. Clarendon papers, 85. Close rolls, 153. Codex, 6. Collectors' weaknesses, 147. Collier, John Payne, 123. Colophons, 40 ; examples of, 44. Colours in illumination, 49. Columba, St., 34, 41, 99. Columns in a page, 9. Conjectural emendation, 6l, 74. Constantine, Donation of, 135. Contractions, 63. Corrector, 40. Cotton, Sir Robert Bruce, 8l, 90; his MSS., 81 ; injury to them by fire, Si, 96, 104. Court-hand, 24, 31. Court rolls, 160. Cromwell MSS., 85. Croyland, history of, 119. Cumje, 22. Cursive, 24, 25. D, history of the letter, 22. Date, mode of expressing a (20 June 1379), 158 n. Dating MSS., 142. Decretals, the False, 117. Deeds, kinds of, 157. Devonshire, Duke of, 89. Dictarc, 32, cf. 133. Dictation, 32. Digby MSS., 85. Dodiworth MSS., 85. Domesday book, 151. Donation of Constantine, 135. Douce MSS., 85. Dublin, Trinity College, 53, 87, 99- Dunstan's supposed writing, *33- Durrow, book of, 87. EBESHAM, William, 44. Ecclesiastical records, 155. Egyptian writing, 20, 92, 93. E,a> Bxiri^iKr:, 135- English, alphabet, 20 ; Chronicle, 102 ; writing and illumination, Index -85 55> 57 ! -swalso Hiberno-Saxon t Plates V. (p. 56), VIII. (p. 106). Ephraemi Codex, 73- Epic Cycle, 39. Epictctus, 60. Essonia, 162. Et (ampersand), 19. Evolvere, 9. Exemplification, 158. Exeter MS S., 84. Explicit, 9. FAIRFAX, 85. False Decretals, 117. Florence MS., 71. Foliating MSS., 146. Folio, meaning, 14. Forgeries, see chap. ix. French writing and illumination, 55> 57> Plates II., VI. GALILEO, Galilei, 130. Gellius, Aulus, 70. Genealogy in MSS., 60, 68. German writing aud illumination, 29, 55. 58. Glanville, Bartholomreus, 12. Glosses, 64, 65, 134. Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of, 84. Gold in MSS., 50. Gospels, history of the four, 71 ; see also Bible. Gothic, hand, 30 ; language, 72. Gough MSS., 85. Greek, 20; MSS., 72, 94. Half-uncial writing, 26. Hargrave MSS., 83. HarleianMSS., 82. Henry VII., date of birth, m. Heraldic visitations, 160. Herculanean rolls, 16, 76, 95. Hertford, first English paper at, 12. Hiberno-Saxon, 28, 29, 53. Hieratic, 20, 93. Hieroglyphic, 20, 92, Plate VII. Hispana, 118. Historiographus, 33. Homer, 38, 51. Homoiot^leuton, 63, 134. Horce (Book of Hours), 137. 139. Hundred rolls, 154. Huntington MSS., 85. Ilyperides, 7. IDEOGRAMS, 18. Illuminations, cost of, 42 ; colours used in, 49 ; in liturgical MSS., 139; how to describe, 146; see Chap. V. Ittuminatores, 36, 49. Indentures, 159. Ingulphus, 119. Inquisitions, 154. Ink, 1 6. Inspexinnis, 158. Ireland and Irish writing and illumination, 27, 99 ; see also Hiberno-Saxon, description of Frontispiece. Ireland, W. II., 122. Isidorus Mercator, 118. Italian writing and illumination, 30, 58- JOHNSON, Dr. Samuel, 122. Juvenal, 67. i86 Books in Manuscript KELLS, book of, 53 ; account of, 99 ; see Frontispiece. Knights' fees, 152. LANSDOWNE MSS., 82. Latin, 20, 94. Laudian MSS., 85. Leipzig, MS. at, 97. Leo III., Pope, 5. Leonardus Aretinus, 132. Liber, 6. Libraries, see Chap. VII., App. A, B ; monastic, 76. Librarii, 36. Libri, Guillaume, 90, 91. Licinianus, C. Granius, "]\. Lindisfame, 28, 100. Liturgical MSS., 41, 107 ; kinds of, 137- . Lombardic, 26. Lucar, Cyril, 73. Lyons, 73. M, history of the letter, 23. Manuscripts, see List of Contents, Writing: meaning of word, I ; use of study of, I ; rights of ownership of, 90. Margaret, St., Queen of Scotland, 107. Martial, 32, 42. Mary Queen of Scots, 135. Matthew Paris, 34. Medicean MS., 71. Melissenda, 41. Merovingian, 26. Mielot, Jean ; see Plate IV., de- scription. Milan, Ambrosian MS. at, 51. Miracle, MS. the subject of a, 108. Missal, 138, Mixture in MSS., 62. Moabite Stone, 21. Moore library, 87. NAPLES, MSS. at, 76, 94 ^liturgy of, 100. National hands, 26, 29. Newton, Sir Isaac, 129. Nicene Creed on silver, 5. Nineveh, 75. Notarii, 36. OCTAVO, meaning, 15. Omar, Caliph, 75. Oppenheimer MSS., 85. Ossian, 136. Ostraka, 13. Oxford, see Ashmolcan Museum, Bodleian Library: College MSS., 87; (Exeter), no; (Queen's), 88, cf. 77; Clar- endon Press, 126. Oxford, Robert and Edward, Earls of, 82. PAL/EOGRAPHY, use of study, 1-4; see Manuscripts. Palimpsests, 71 ;/. Paper, the word, 8 ; as material, 10, n, 14. Papyrus, 6, II. Parchment, 9, II, 13. Parian Chronicle, 5. Paris National Library, 73, 89, 9i, 93- Parker MSS., 87. Pascal, Blaise, 129. Paston Letters, 43. in. Patent rolls, 153. Pecles finium, 154. Pens, 16. Index 187 Pergamena, 10. Phalaris, letters of, 115. Phillipps Library, 88, 125. Phoenician, 20. Phonographic writing, 19. Photography for MSS., 148. Picture writing, 18. Pipe rolls, 153. Placita de quo warranto, 154. PocockeMSS., 85. Poggio Bracciolini, 130. Pompeii, 51, 94, 95. Portiforium, 141. Prices of writing, etc., 42. Primer, 141. Prisse papyrus, 93. Procopius, 132. Prust, John, 43. Purple MSS., 50. QUARITCH, Bernard, Quarto, meaning, 14. Quaternions, 14, 143. RAWLINSON MSS., 85. Records in England, 150. Reculver, 133. Reynbold, John, 43. Richard de Bury, Bp., 77. Roll-form of book, 13. Rome, 102 ; see Vatican ; liturgy of, 10 1. Rosetta stone, 5. Rowley, Thomas, 121. Royal collections of MSS., 80, 83. Ruling of MSS., 37. Rustic capitals, 26, 71. SACRAMENTARY, 141 ; see Plate III. St. Alban's, 33, 34, 37. St. Gall, 25, 71. St. Petersburg, 72, 96, 127. Samarkand, 12. Scipios, tombs of the, 5. Scribes, ^/Chaps. III., VI. Scriptorium, 33 ; sec Plate IV. (p. 37). Selden MSS., 85. Semitic, Old, 20. Send or Sent inscription, 21, 92, Plate VII. (p. 92). Shakespeare forgeries, 122. Shapira, 128. Siatoutanda, 132. Signatures of witnesses, 133, 159. Siloam inscription, 21. Silver in MSS., 50. Simonides, Constantine, 124. Sinaiticus, Codex, 72, 96, 127. Size of MSS., 145. Sloane MSS., 82. Spain, paper in, 12. Stilus, 12, 37. Stone inscriptions, 5. Stonyhurst, MS. Gospel at, 41. Stowe, missal, 41 ; MSS., 83. Syriac, 72, 83, ill. TACITUS, 2, 62, 130. Tate, John, 12. Ten Commandments, 5. Terence, 52. Textual criticism, see Chap. VI. Thucydides, 114. Tischendorf, Constantine, 96. Titchfield Abbey library, 78. Tours, 27, 29. ULFILAS, 72. Uncial writing, 26. Uranius, 125. i88 Books in Manuscript Ussher MSS., 87, 99. Utrecht Psalter, 90. VATICAN Library, 51, 70, 71, 72, 89. Vellum, 10. Venice, MS. at, 38. Verona, MS. at, 71. Vesuvius, 76, 95. Vienna, MS. at, 71. Virgil, 2 ; manuscripts of, 25, 51 ; examples of errors from MSS. of Virgil, 63 ; literary history of, 70. Visigothic, 26. Visitations, heraldic, 1 60. Volume, the word, 9. Vrain-Lucas forgeries, 128. WALPOLE, Horace, 121. Watermarks, 12, 15. Wax tablets, 12, 94. W T hitby, 105 ; council of, 28. Windsor MSS., 84. Wills, 159. Writing, history of, see Chaps. II., III., IV. ; details of scribe's work, 37. Wood, writing on, 6. Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty, nt the Edinburgh University Press. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 001 120 158 9