possessed the smallest aptitude for the critical study of the Greek Bible. Appointed to the superintendence of the forthcoming papal edition, on that fatal 12th of March which cut short Tischendorf's hopes, he came forward, we are told, in re incerta amicus certus. He undertook to be present and in charge of the manuscript, while the German went through the rest of the New Testament, and revised his earlier collations, and was to receive for his rich reward the use of Tischendorf's papers. It must have been an interesting thing indeed for Vercellone to be privileged to witness that marvellous facility, peculiar to Tischendorf among critical collators, whereby at a glance he discerns the original reading of a difficult passage, underlying the several corrections of later hands, by which it has been corrupted and obscured. What others accomplish in this way by painful efforts and after many fruitless trials, seems with him one simple effort of instinctive genius. Like a skilful physician, he has grown familiar with the causes of disease, and with the ever-varying aspect which it wears to common eyes,

'Till old experience do attain

To something like prophetic strain.'

We cannot find (for here Tischendorf is not very explicit) that the time he expended over the manuscript, when it was in Vercellone's custody, exceeded the stipulated fortnight. He cites an extract from a letter addressed by him to Vercellone on the 27th of March, which seems designed to review the whole transaction. He had his audience of leave-taking with the Pope on the 20th of April, in which he proffered to his Holiness his best services in behalf of the future edition of Vercellone; and he has since forwarded to Rome the splendid types used for the larger edition of Codex Sinaiticus, with which the sheets of the Codex Vaticanus began to be set up in February last. (Tisch. Proleg. pp. viii.-x.)

He

Such, in brief, is all that we have to look for from the volume we are reviewing. The editor is not to be censured in the least for its manifold and obvious defects, the causes of which he had in vain striven to remove; yet the fact remains the same. has enjoyed the full use of the manuscript he professes to edit for only thirty hours; for about the same time he has had hurried access to it, with his attention distracted by the presence of another person. Since he cannot be expected to have done anything like justice to the most difficult and one of the most important documents preserved to us from remote antiquity, we cannot but regret that his book has been ushered into the world with so loud a flourish of trumpets; that he has spread over

an expensive quarto materials that might have been compressed into a full-sized pamphlet ; and above all, that he should have paid the University of Oxford the poor compliment of dedicating to her a work whose provisional and imperfect character he does not attempt to conceal.

The Codex Vaticanus, whatever be its earlier history, has probably been in the Vatican ever since Nicholas V. founded the library in 1448. Since the last portions of the New Testament (from Heb. ix. 14 to the end of that book, the four Pastoral Epistles and the Apocalypse) are supplied in a hand of the fifteenth century from a manuscript which once belonged to Cardinal Bessarion, it is possible that this learned Greek brought it with him into the West. It was first distinctly noticed by Sepulveda in 1534, who supplied Erasmus with 365 of its readings, one of which (kavda, Acts xxvii. 16) he expressly cites in his Annotations on the Acts, 1535. Erasmus seems also to have heard something about it (in relation to 1 John v. 7, 8) from Paul Bombasius, the Vatican librarian, as early as 1521. Of the 759 leaves which it contains, only 146 belong to the New Testament; the rest are devoted to the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, complete from Gen. xlvi. 28, Toλ, where the text begins. All that the ordinary visitor sees of it is its splendid red morocco binding as it stands in its place on the Vatican shelves; it is ten and a half inches high, ten broad, four and a half thick.' Codex Sinaiticus, its rival and contemporary, is considerably larger, being even now that the margins are cut, fourteen and seven-eighths inches high and thirteen and a half broad. vellum of each is excellent, though unequal in quality; that of Codex Vaticanus is perhaps rather the thinner and of the better quality. Codex Sinaiticus contains four columns of forty-eight lines each on every page, eight on each open leaf; Codex Vaticanus three columns of forty-two lines each on every page, six on each open leaf. The breadth of each column in the two manuscripts is about equal; but inasmuch as the letters of the Vatican book are somewhat the smaller, each line contains about sixteen or eighteen letters (written continuously, like all others of that age, without distinction or space between the words), whereas that of Sinai averages but thirteen or fourteen letters in a line. Where the original writing can be seen unaltered in the Vatican copy, the ink resembles that of its sister Codex, being of a yellowish brown shade; but the main difficulty of

The

1 We adopt Mr. Burgon's measurement. Tischendorf, who reckons by the sheet or open leaf, makes the size nearly the same: 'latum est 18 pollices mensuræ Gallicæ, altum 10 pollices, ita ut altitudo [meaning, we presume, latitudo], pollicibus octo altitudinem exsuperet.' (Proleg. p. xvii.)

using Codex Vaticanus arises from the fact that its fading letters were retraced and furnished with breathings and accents by a scribe of the tenth or eleventh century in coarser ink and with no great care; the earlier characters being visible chiefly in those places which the corrector left untouched, either because the first penman had written them in error, or through desire to modernize the spelling by passing over one or more letters in a word. This peculiarity it must principally be which lends to every fac-simile of Codex Vaticanus which we have seen a rugged and irregular appearance; the hand seems unsteady and the letters to stand unevenly, unlike those of any document approaching its age and value. We need not add how largely the responsibility of an editor must be increased by the fact that he can seldom discern the original letters beneath the strokes which have been so injudiciously traced over them. In the disposition of the sheets also which compose a quire, Codex Vaticanus, to judge by the primitive numerals yet surviving the scissors which cut off its outer margin, was not arranged in quaternions of four sheets or eight leaves each, like Codices Sinaiticus and Bezæ, but in quinions of five sheets or ten leaves each; though we should not choose to infer, as Tischendorf does, from this unimportant circumstance, that it could not have been (as might the Codex Sinaiticus) one of the fifty copies described by Eusebius (Vit. Const. iv. 36, 37) as having been made by the first Christian emperor's order to supply the churches of his new capital, Constantinople.

We have stated (p. 409) that Tischendorf excited the suspicions of the Vatican authorities in March 1866, by copying entire pages of the Codex as it lay before him. We consider the eighteen pages he has thus been enabled to exhibit to us the most instructive portion of his disappointing book; and we will illustrate what we have yet to say on the subject by reference to the page containing the celebrated passage in 1 John v., which we subjoin for the benefit of such of our readers as have not ready access to the volume under review.2

1 We observe a little of this irregularity even in those two passages untouched by the later hand (Rom. iv. 4; 2 Cor. iii. 15, 16), which Tischendorf had traced in 1843, and now publishes

2 The only other complete page of Codox Vaticanus yet published is the poor fac-simile of the first extant leaf of the Old Testament (Gen. xlvi. 28, &c.) in the first volume of Mai's larger edition.

At the foot of the page Tischendorf records the changes brought into the text by two later hands, which he calls B2 and B3, the latter of them being the writer of the breathings and accents. B, for instance, invariably leaves untouched, and so

rejects, v after at the end of a verb before a consonant beginning the next word; for copañaμev (col. 1, ll. 41, 42) spells εωρακαμεν; for γεινωσκομεν, νείκα, νεική, νεικησασα, by leaving e untouched, would read γινωσκομεν, νικα, νικη, νικησασα : while B2 had previously corrected the worst errors by inserting Tо Oν аɣажа K, after col. 2, 1. 3, and es before Tv, col. 2, 1. 34. In col. 2, 1. 37, μатuрou for μaрTupov, looks more like a typographical oversight of Tischendorf's book, than a blunder of the scribe.

From a specimen like the above, even the inexperienced student may form some notion of the genius and general appearance of the oldest Greek manuscripts extant. He must, however, bear in mind that documents of so high antiquity are invariably written, not as we have here represented them, in common type, with spaces between the words, but continuously (e. g. col. 1, 1. 1. ATTOCENHMINOTIEK) in uncial or capital letters, of the squarest, most simple, yet very graceful forms. So little regard is paid to the division of words, that even the letters of such short particles as ovx (col. 1, 1. 41) and ovx (col. 2, 1. 19) are separated at the end of a line. The purpose of the scribe was clearly to preserve on the vellum a close resemblance to the more familiar style of writing on the papyrus, a material that compelled men to employ long slips, which never exceeded two and a half or three inches in breadth. The fact that these two documents, the Codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus (B and ), alone among those which approach to them in date, should be found to exhibit so marked a resemblance to the papyrus rolls buried in the ruins of Herculaneum, A. D. 79, and which there remained undisturbed for seventeen centuries, a resemblance as great in regard to the shapes of the letters as to the general form of the books themselves, suffices to place them in a class by themselves, and persuade us to regard them as prior to any others extant by an interval of full fifty years.

And closer observation discloses other circumstances which would lead us to the same conclusion. If the reader will please to glance once more at our specimen page, he will see that no letter is larger than the rest. The practice of beginning a new sentence, or even a new chapter (col. 2. 1. 5), with what is now termed a capital letter, had not yet come into use. It is quite otherwise with the two Biblical manuscripts which approximate closest to the or B in age, Codex Alexandrinus (A) in the British Museum, Codex Ephraemi (C) at Paris. In these last, which are fairly assigned to the fifth century of our era, letters decidedly larger than the other uncials in which they are written perpetually intrude into the left-hand margin at the commencement of a new sentence: they were not admitted into