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LATIN MSS.

We turn to the Latin division, and here the difficulty of selecting lines of procedure is very great. A paragraph of historical preface, at any rate, must be attempted.

At the period of the Barbarian invasions–the fifth century–the learned countries were Italy, France (especially Southern France) and Spain. Of these three, Italy may be described as stationary or even decadent, but she possessed greater accumulations of books than either of the other two. The result of the invasions was, no doubt, that libraries were destroyed and education dislocated; but there was another result, as we have lately begun to realize–namely, that in the case of France there was a transplanting of culture to another soil. A number of teachers fled the country, and some at least came to Ireland. This, as far as we can now see, was the beginning of that Irish learning which has been so widely, yet so vaguely, extolled. Ireland, then, in the late fifth century and the sixth, holds the lamp. Its light passes to England in the middle of the seventh century, and from thence, near the end of the eighth, to the Court of Charlemagne, where it initiates the Carolingian Renaissance. In the ninth century, when England is a prey to the Danes, the Carolingian Court and the great abbeys of Germany are enjoying a vigorous intellectual life, stimulated and enriched by scholars from Italy and from Ireland. In a general view the tenth and eleventh centuries must figure as a period of degeneration; the twelfth as one of immense intellectual and artistic vigour, culminating in the thirteenth. In the fourteenth the foundations of what we call the Renaissance are already being laid, and we have hardly passed the middle of the fifteenth before the MS. has received its death-blow in the publication of the first printed Bible.

This absurdly condensed review of ten centuries has, I believe, some truth in it, in spite of the fact that every clause needs qualification. We shall have to go over the same ground again a little more slowly. At present we will devote a little time to the beginnings of our period.

A few relics of the days before the Barbarian invasion have reached us. I am not thinking of the library of rolls found at Herculaneum in the eighteenth century, the unrolling and decipherment of which still goes on slowly at Naples, nor of the many precious fragments of rolls and books which have come in our own generation from Egypt, but rather of those which have been preserved above ground in libraries. Such are the Virgils of the Vatican, of St. Gall, and of Florence.

Perhaps a word about these ancient Virgils will not be unwelcome. They are cited in all the textbooks, it is true, but I think they are apt to be confused; at any rate it is easy to confuse them.

They are five in number: three very fragmentary, two more or less complete. The surnames they go by are Sangallensis, Augusteus, Vaticanus, Romanus, Mediceus.

Sangallensis and Augusteus are practically the only pieces of books we have which are written in the old square capitals, like those of the Roman inscriptions. Sangallensis consists of a few leaves which were found by Von Arx, a librarian of St. Gall, in the bindings of books in that abbey’s library. Of Augusteus there are four leaves at Rome (Vaticanus latinus 3,256) and three at Berlin; and somewhere, perhaps in a private library in France, is or was another bit which was known to scholars in the seventeenth century. This copy was once at the Royal Abbey of St. Denis. Both of these are fourth-century books at latest.

Vaticanus (lat. 3,225) is a more complete copy, illustrated with fifty paintings in good classical style, and is also assigned to the fourth century.

Romanus (Vat. lat. 3,867), once at St. Denis, is a pictured copy too, but not nearly so good in style.