complete, Tischendorf does not appear to have formed any opinion, not having noticed the signatures of the quaternions. These, however, make it clear that it was a book of the four Gospels ending with St. Matthew. Fol. 1, as we have seen, begins the thirty-third quaternion. There are, therefore, thirty-two quaternions, or 256 leaves, lost previous to Mark viii. 8. I calculate that if the earlier part of St. Mark were written on the same method as what is now extant, it might have occupied four quaternions, or thirty-two leaves; and that the remaining twenty-eight quaternions, or 224 leaves, would amply suffice for St. John and St. Luke, with several leaves to spare. The remainder of St. Matthew, written on the same principles, would occupy, perhaps, fifty-eight leaves. The total size of the book would then have been

Allowing one blank leaf at the end this would make a volume of fiftytwo quaternions-a thick one no doubt, but not unmanageable if made up as this was of fine vellum. Its sister MS., the Palatine Gospels, contained, I believe, about 350 leaves, the Munich Gospels 273.

In the foregoing statement I have assumed that the order of the Gospels was John, Luke, Mark, Matthew, rather than Luke, John, &c. This I do because there are several instances of books of the Gospels beginning with St. John, whereas we have only one on record beginning with St. Luke: and further the particular order which we suppose our MS. to have exhibited is paralleled by the uncial Greek MS. of the Gospels (of the ninth or tenth century), at Munich, usually quoted as x. See C. R. Gregory in his Prolegomena to Tischendorf's New Testament, p. 138, Leipsig, 1884. The one MS. known to me in which St. Luke stands first is the 'Aureum' of Erasmus, now in a glass case in the Escurial: see g1, Appendix I. p. 51. There may, however, not improbably be others at present undescribed.

§ 5. History. The chief interest attaching to our manuscript arises from the tradition which connects it with the life of St. Columban,

generally esteemed the earliest of those noble Celtic missionaries who evangelized central Europe. The inscription still found in the volume (see above, p. vii) declares that 'ut traditum fuit illud erat idem liber quem Beatus Columbanus Abbas in pera secum ferre consueverat.' It was therefore, if this be true, the companion of those travels which ended at Bobbio in 613, about two years before his death. The reader may be reminded that, according to the most probable accounts, Columban was born in Leinster about 543 (the year of St. Benedict's death), that he left his monastery of Bangor on the coast of Down about 585, ten years before the mission of Augustine to Kent, and settled for nearly five-and-twenty years in the kingdom of Burgundy. Here he founded his order first at Anagrates (Annegray), and then about 590 at Luxovium, at the foot of the Vosges (now Luxeuil in the department of the Haute Saône). He was finally banished from the kingdom by the violent and profligate Brunehild and her son Theodoric (Thierry II), in 610. After being carried to the coast at Nantes and put on board a ship bound for Ireland, he returned somehow to the mainland, and found a resting-place first in Neustria, and then in Austrasia; but he did not venture to return to Luxeuil. After a short stay at Metz he passed along the Rhine and its tributaries to the lake of Zurich, preaching to the Alemanni and Suevi. Then he moved onward to the lake of Constance, where he left his companion St. Gall. From this retreat he was again driven out and crossed the Alps into Lombardy, where he was kindly received by king Agilulf, who assigned to him a wild and solitary district in the Ligurian Apennines, near the river Trebia. Here he founded the great monastery of Bobium or Bobbio, and died two years later, on November 21, 6151.

'A. Peyron's description of the site is worth quoting: :- In valle quam Alpes Penninae ad Liguriam pertinentes efficiunt quasi circino circumductae est urbs Bobium praeter oram Trebiae. Duae ad illam ferunt viae; altera a Viqueria secus amnem Staforam, altera a Placentia secundum Trebiam. Utraque primum patens et aperta; tum intra fluminis alveum modo lubrica modo glareosa; dein ardua per montium iuga; tandem per clivosos tramites praeceps; utraque iniqua et triginta millia passuum. Quid enim commemorem viam quae ad Genuam spectat difficiliorem, aliis atque aliis montibus obiectis, itidemque longiorem? Hinc raros mercatores ad Bobium commeare, a cultu provinciae abesse, neminem aut per occasionem alio eundi, aut, animi gratia, illuc contendere, nullam praedae spem facere populabundo exercitui; ut recte Bobium dicas urbem a tota Italia divisam. Hanc sedem D. Columbanus ineunte saeculo vii, sibi suisque delegit, in qua sancta oblivia vitae capiens Divinarum rerum meditationi vacaret

That an Irish missionary should carry a book of this kind about with him in a wallet or leathern pouch is natural enough. Such a satchel still exists for the book of Armagh (now at Dublin), and is described by Dr. Reeves at the end of a valuable little Memoir of that MS. written by him when vicar of Lush, and dated April 1861, which he was good enough to send me some years ago. 'We know (he continues) from record, that it was customary with the Irish, in early times, to carry about their religious books, whether scriptural or liturgical, in leathern satchels, and by the same provision to dispose of them in the library. Bookshelves seem to have been unknown in the primitive economy of Irish monasteries, and all the volumes were suspended in satchels, by straps, from pins or hooks in the wall. This plan is still adopted in some eastern monasteries, and the Hon. Robert Curzon's travels in the Levant furnish us with a drawing and explanation quite in point, when he describes the library of the ancient convent of Souziani, in Egypt, on the west of the Nile1. It is also by a knowledge of this practice of the Irish that we are enabled, while we reject the fable, to appreciate the allusion in the old legend of St. Longaradh, the learned, of Offerlane, which states that "on the night of Longaradh's death all the booksatchels of Ireland fell down;" and again, "Columkille, and all those who were with him, wondered and were silent when they heard the shaking of the books" (p. 12). Such satchels were called polaires, and we know of three at least besides that of the Armagh New Testament still in existence 2.

(1. c. p. v).' Peyron places the decay of learning in the monastery as early as the 10th century, and dates the mutilation and destruction of the MSS. from very early times. Besides the ignorance of the monks, the foundation of a bishopric at Bobbio in 1014, and the struggles of the civil community to obtain independence of the monastery, led to great waste of time and energy in quarrels about rights and privileges.

1

Cp. Mr. Alfred J. Butler, of Brasenose College, The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt, vol. ii. p. 246, Oxford 1884. Mr. Butler did not find such satchels now in use amongst the Copts, but he remarks on the similarity of the intricate plait-work borders in Irish and Coptic MSS. He adduces other parallels to Irish usage, ii. pp. 52, 60 foll., 81, 171, 215, 229. Many of these are also mentioned by Mr. Warren, Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church, pp. 46-55, Oxf. 1881.

2

Cp. F. E. Warren, Missale vetus Hibernicum, p. 20, Oxf. 1877, Liturgy and Ritual, &c. pp. 22 and 54. They were called in Irish polaire or tiagha lebar, the pelliceus sacculus of Adamnan' (Vita S. Columbae, ii. 8). Besides the cover of the Book of Armagh, we have that of the shrine of St. Maidoc, the case of the Oxford Corpus Missal (No. 282 in Mr. Coxe's cata

But if this detail is easily explicable, how are we to account for Columban's possession of an 'African' text of the Gospels, written by a man who was very ignorant of the Latin language, but was better acquainted with the Greek characters? Mr. Sanday's essay (§ 10) demonstrates conclusively the correctness of the general opinion that our text has great affinity with that used by St. Cyprian. As to the Greek affinities of the book beside the CATA of the headlines, the blunders that meet us on nearly every page prove to us that that F, R, and S were unfamiliar letters to our scribe, and his occasional substitution of P for R is probably a Graecism. In view of circumstances like this Tischendorf hazards the same conjecture as he had previously made in regard to the cognate MS., the Palatine Gospels (e, Vienna no. 1185), that it was written in Africa by an Alexandrian calligraph, who was wholly ignorant of Latin1, but he gives no suggestion as to how it came into St. Columban's possession.

The book may have been more than a hundred years old when its owner, then probably about seventy, reached Bobbio, and he had hardly then been sufficiently long in Italy to have acquired it there. If we could believe with Rossetti2 that Columban came first into Italy at the end of the sixth century, and visited Gregory the Great at Rome, 'from whom he brought back an alabaster vase full of remarkable relics of the saints,' there would not be much difficulty in his possession of such a book. But this opinion is founded on an apparently forged charter by which Columban offers the monastery of Bobbio to Gregory in 599: and the silence of his early biographer, Jonas, in regard to such a visit may be considered as conclusive. The miracle reported by Ughelli, that all the bells (signa) of the churches sounded of themselves when he entered Rome, does not add much to the support of what is almost certainly a pious invention intended to counteract Columban's strong language as regards the papacy.

logue), which I have several times examined, and one in the convent of St. Isidore at Rome, seen by Professor Westwood. Another encasing an Ethiopic MS. is preserved in the library of St. John's College, Oxford, so like that of the Corpus Missal 'in texture and design (says Mr. Warren, Lit. and R., p. 54), that they might be thought to have come from the same workshop.'

1 Wiener Jahrbücher, cxx. Anz. Blatt., p. 45, 1847, cp. Evangelium Palatinum Prolegomena, p. xix., Lipsiae 1847.

2 Bobbio Illustrato, i. pp. 3 foll., Torino 1795.

If then we reject this journey to Rome we have to suppose that he either brought the book from Ireland, or acquired it during his residence in Gaul. The former of these suppositions opens an interesting field of speculation. The eastern affinities of the Irish and British Churches have been often asserted and often denied. Mr. F. E. Warren has recently summed up the evidence on both sides in a convenient form', and he certainly leaves the impression of a much wider and more frequent intercourse between the churches than we are at first inclined. to suppose. He does not, indeed, suppose that eastern usages came into these islands directly from Greece or Asia Minor, but from Gaul. Nevertheless the presence of a book of this kind brought from Africa (or possibly Alexandria) would not be very surprising. We find Columban defending the Celtic Easter by referring to Anatolius, bishop of Laodicea, A. D. 270, and quoting a canon of the second Council of Constantinople. It is known that the Celtic party at Whitby (however erroneously) defended their usage on the authority of St. John 3. Sometimes (says Mr. Warren, p. 56), Eastern pilgrims visited Ireland. Seven Egyptian monks, buried at Disert Ulidh, are invoked in the Félire of Oengus;' and again, British clergy are recorded to have visited Constantinople during the patriarchate of Methodius (842-847) for the sake of obtaining information about the Paschal cycle' (p. 57)3.

The only parallel in regard to books that occurs to me is the instance of the Epternach Gospels, probably of the eighth century (now at Paris, N. L. Lat. 9389). At the end of that volume, which is written in an Irish or Saxon hand, occurs the following inscription :—

'Proemendaui ut potui secundum codicem de bibliotheca Eugipi praespiteri quem ferunt fuisse sancti hieronimi indictione. VI. post consulatum basilii u. c. anno septimo decimo (= A.D. 558) o.

This note is, of course, copied with the rest of the book from a

1 Liturgy and Ritual, &c. pp. 46-62.

2 Columban, Ep. 1 ad S. Gregorium, c. 3 (he seems, however, to have known Anatolius only from Jerome), and Ep. 3 ad Bonifacium IV.

3 Bede, H. E. iii. 25.

4

J. Colgan, Acta SS. Hibern., p. 539, Lovanii 1645.

Vit. Anon. Chrysost. Op., tom. viii. p. 321. 5, ed. Savile, 1612.

For facsimiles see Delisle, Cabinet des MSS., vol. iii. p. 231, and Atlas, pl. xix. 8; Westwood, A. S. and Irish MSS., p. 58. pl. xxi.; and Silvestre, pl. ccxxvi.