of imperial Rome. When it is stated, as a sign of the blindness of the contemporary historians, that, 'if Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, are the most virtuous, the most able, the 'most successful of the Cæsars, the secret, as our authorities 'intimate, of their eminence lay in the favour in which they 'held the most august order of the citizens,' what test have we by which, amid the snares alleged to be laid for our credulity by partisanship, we may be able to assure ourselves that the same writers' pictures of the virtues and genius of these great sovereigns are not, equally with the alleged theory as to their source and secret cause, the delusion and snare of inveterate political prejudices? Possibly, if we are not to rely on the descriptions given by the historians of the age, we may have been quite wrong in our conclusions: Domitian may, then, for all we know, have been an angel of light, the victim of a base faction of oligarchical slanderers; and Trajan and the Antonines servile trucklers to the passions and sordid interests of a corrupt noblesse.

In this poverty of materials for historical composition, Mr. Merivale may at all events find much ground for confidence that his work will not be quickly superseded. For cui bono? No after-writer could hope to surpass the vigour with which he has described the beginning of the fall of the Roman empire, such as our few authorities have portrayed it to us, or the ingenuity of his views on very many topics. It is certainly rather a hopeless theme for any but an antiquarian, when a bust, a coin, or inscription (materials, themselves scarcely enough utilized by Mr. Merivale in the dearth of others), has to stand in the place of annalists and biographers. The very facts themselves here are, in a great measure, wanting. It is not merely a question how the lights and shadows are to play about the facts of a life, or the details of a policy, but how and whence the facts and details themselves can be extracted. If Mr. Merivale's theory be true, we must suspend our Tacitus and Suetonius, and all their fellows, till fresh evidence can be brought by which to test the honesty of their narratives; while from no quarter whatever can we hope that such evidence is forthcoming, or likely to be. Such, at least, seems to be Mr. Merivale's view; and, although it is rather an exaggeration, we believe it to contain too much substantial truth for him to have reason to fear that any one will be tempted soon to reap after him in a field so barren of attainable grain, although, perhaps, for moderns, of all periods of history the most tempting and interesting.

374

ART. VI.1. Bibliorum Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus. Auspiciis augustissimis imperatoris Alexandri II. ex tenebris protraxit, in Europam transtulit ad juvandas atque illustrandas sacras litteras edidit CONSTANTINUS TISCHENDORF. Petropoli. MDCCCLXII.

2. Aus dem heiligen Lande. Von CONSTANTIN TISCHENDORF. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1862.

FAITHFUL to his promise, Tischendorf the Indefatigable has brought out his fac-simile edition of the Codex Sinaiticus, in the tenth century from the first rise of the now gigantic Russian empire. In less than three years from the time when the MS. was discovered in the closet of the skeuophylax at the monastery of S. Catherine, it has been printed in a type which rivals Baber's edition of the Septuagint from the Codex Alexandrinus, or Kipling's edition of the Codex Beza. This wonderful piece of typography is now before the world, 'labore multorum annorum intra triennium absoluto,' as the Professor states in his dedication to Alexander II., most august Emperor of all the Russians. The MS. was first discovered February 4, 1859. On February 13, the Professor arrived at Cairo from Mount Sinai; on February 24, the MS. was sent to him at Cairo, and the work of transcription was immediately commenced, with the assistance of two fellow-countrymen, one a doctor of medicine, the other an apothecary. On September 28, 1859, the MS. was finally placed in the hands of the Professor, that he might offer it to the Emperor of Russia. The Professor arrived, with his precious parchments, at S. Petersburgh in November, 1859, and in the following month he went with half of them to Leipzig, where he immediately took measures for printing the MS. in fac-simile. At the end of March, 1860, he again repaired to S. Petersburgh 'per nives septentrionales,' and in May he returned to Leipzig, bringing with him the whole of the MS. except twenty leaves, which were left to be photographed. Not till July, 1860, were the first sheets in the press. The result is four large and handsome volumes,

1 While the work of transcription was going on, it seems that a young Englishman actually made a bid for the document. See 'Aus dem heiligen Lande,' p. 117.

the first containing prolegomena, commentary, and twenty-one photo-lithographed plates,1 the second and third containing portions of the Old Testament and Apocrypha, the fourth containing the New Testament, with the epistle of Barnabas and a fragment of the Shepherd of Hermas. The printing of the last three volumes (those containing the text) was finished in July, 1861. Specimen sheets of these were sent to the International Exhibition in London, May, 1862, and obtained a prize. The dedication to the Emperor is dated Leipzig, 30 Augt. 11 Sept. 1862, and the Professor there says, 'ut . . . hodie in TUAS manus tradere possem.' On January 7, 1863, Bodley's librarian at Oxford had received the copy for which he had privately subscribed; and his kindness in allowing us to have immediate and free access to the publication has enabled us to gather the materials for this article. We gladly seize this opportunity of thanking him for this and very many other instances of ready attention and uniform courtesy. Now, really, when we consider that Baber's fac-simile edition of the LXX. occupied him with Herculean labours (it is his own phrase) between the years 1812 and 1828, we may indeed be astonished at the rapidity with which the Codex Sinaiticus has been committed to type and carried through the press. It seems as if steam had introduced an accelerating power into learned pursuits; we only hope (may we be pardoned for venturing to say so) that the present work may not exemplify the old proverb, 'The more haste, the worse speed.'"

2

It is only due to the Czar to mention, that under his auspices and by his munificence the work has been executed. He may well be proud of such a bloodless trophy to grace the millenary of his empire; glad shall we be if the event show (in spite of Polish troubles) that with him, at all events, L'Empire c'est la paix, and that we may hail the publication of an additional most ancient witness to the genuineness of the Gospel text, as a proof that he is not unmindful of what the Gospel is intended to promote, ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας, if we may venture to adopt the reading (a prima manu) in the Codex Sinaiticus. Of the original discovery and general character of the Codex Sinaiticus, we endeavoured to give some account in the Christian Remembrancer, January, 1861. Professor

1 Seventeen plates represent actual pages in the MS., the other four represent passages selected from different parts of the MS. and from other MSS.

2 The Prince Regent authorized the commencement of the work in 1814, The Prolegomena are dated Kal. July, 1828. Mr. Baber had published the Psalms from the Codex Alexandrinus in 1812.

3 One instance we may perhaps be able to produce.

Tischendorf repeats in his prolegomena some of the details which he had given in his previously published 'Notitia,' but as these have in various ways been brought before the public, we will pass on at once to the fresh information conveyed in the prolegomena to the edition.

I. THE TYPOGRAPHICAL ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE IMPERIAL EDITION. Two alphabets were engraved in brass, one in characters of a size to correspond as nearly as possible to the average appearance of the letters in the text, the other in smaller characters, to correspond to the letters employed in the notes. A third alphabet, in still smaller characters, was also cut to represent the small characters which occur at the end of a line, or where, from want of space, the letters are written more closely together. In some cases two letters were cut together on one block, as AY and oY; in other cases single letters were so cut, that two could be placed close to each other, as AT, Y, AYo, A. As the work went on, and from time to time new forms or new combinations of letters made their appearance, the Professor again had recourse to the engravers, who supplied fresh modifications of shape or size in the letters T, w, 0, §, 1 for M, R for KAI, joined letters, as NH, MI, TH, MNH; abbreviations; and even different lengths of super-written lines, as in Y, @Y, ō, ō, ō. But what appears to have involved more labour than anything else, is this; the spaces between the letters in the MS. are by no means uniform. Determined that his fac-simile should, in this respect also, be faithful to the original, the Professor ordered brass spacing-lines to be cut, so that the different breadths of blank between each letter might be correctly represented. Of these he says that more than 100,000 different spacings were required for the New Testament alone. When we bear in mind that in the process of printing not only the letters but the spaces had to be corrected, and are told further, that thirty columns of quadruple text had to be copied out, set up, corrected, and printed per week, we may well be astonished at these truly Herculean labours.'

The printing was put into the hands of Giesecke and Devrient, duumvirorum excolenda arte typographica clarorum.' The Professor adds, Nihil autem unquam operis typographicis traditum est, nisi quod ipsi e codice, quem nunquam de manibus emisimus, transcripsimus, variisque signis ad imitandam veterem scripturam auximus.' If we understand rightly the statement made in the prolegomena, it would appear

that the types were corrected after they were set up by the compositor, that is, we suppose, before they were put to paper. This laborious, but most important work, was performed by friends, including one named Gustavus Mühlman, and Clement Tischendorf, nephew to the Professor. Lastly, the Professor himself corrected the types ad ipsum codicem.'

Delarue and Co. of London supplied a kind of paper very like parchment, but of this no more was ordered than would suffice for twenty copies. These copies de luxe, will, we presume, be reserved like 'imperial' Tokayer Ausbruch, for Emperors and Kings' alone; but ordinary mortals may well be content with the ordinary vintage, especially since it turns out that this imitation-parchment is (like certain high-priced wines) rather too dry-for printing purposes. Professor Tischendorf seems to be a little disappointed with the results of the photographing process; at all events he was not satisfied with the photographers of S. Petersburgh. Accordingly, out of the twenty pages which he intended to represent by the photolithographic process, only ten were done at S. Petersburgh; in these ten, however, great improvement was made; the remaining ten were executed at Leipzig; hence, in the brief notice which precedes the tabulæ, the title of Tabula Petropolitana is prefixed to some, of Tabula Lipsiensis to others. But evanescence and erasures are formidable foes to photographing a MS.; nor does a photograph represent accurately the different colours of ink.1 There is in the first volume, besides the prolegomena and photo-lithographed plates, a commentary upon each single page of the fac-simile. The commentary mentions whether the page is written on the outer or inner side of the skin, and also the corrections made, either by the original scribes (for there were more than one) or by subsequent hands. These corrections, which the Professor in his 'Notitia' calculated at 8,000, have turned out to be nearly double that number, and have required more than 1,500 notes in the way of notice and elucidation, There are as many as 1,000 erasures, and these give the MS. in some parts a palimpsestic appearance. It will be observed, that in the printed fac-simile very nearly all the corrections are eliminated from the text and thrown into the commentary. In this respect the edition of the Codex Sinaiticus differs from that of the Codex Friderico-Augustanus.

II. PARCHMENT, INK, CORRECTIONS, &C. OF THE MS.The parchment is generally sufflava' in colour, thin, and smooth, although of course the leaves vary; some are worm

1 This we are enabled to state after comparing a photographed page (otherwise perfectly rendered) of the Codex Landianus with the original.