Dec. 15. 1855.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



473 



well, which were sold by Messrs. Leigh and 

 Sotheby after his decease, there was, among 

 other interesting papers, a letter from Sir Joshua 

 Reynolds to Edward Malone, in which is the fol- 

 lowing passage : 



"I have sent by my servant my Discourse, which I 

 shall take as a great favour if you not only will examine 

 critically, but will likewise add a little elegance," 



I neglected, in making this extract, to note the 

 date ; but the letter is doubtless still in existence, 

 and may be traced to its present possessors. 

 Burke survived Reynolds five years, and there- 

 fore must have been then as accessible as Malone, 

 had Sir Joshua been in the habit of seeking his 

 assistance. 



But let us hear Burke himself, in a letter to 

 Malone, after the publication of Sir Joshua's Life 

 and Works. He says : 



" I have read over some parts of the Discourses with an 

 unusual sort of pleasure, partly because, being a little 

 faded from my memorj', they have a sort of appearance 

 of novelty; partly by reviving recollections mixed with 

 melancholy and satisfaction. The Flemish journal I had 

 never seen before. You trace in that everywhere the 

 spirit of the Discourses, supported by new examples. He 

 is always the same man, the same philosophical, the same 

 artist-like critic, the same sagacious observer, ivith the same 

 minuteness, without the smallest degree of trifling." 



Is this the language of one who had himself 

 written the Discourses ? It is to libel Burke as 

 well as Sir Joshua Reynolds to give currency to 

 this falsehood. Northcote, his pupil, who lived 

 some years in his house, had, however, effectively 

 answered the scandalous fiction long since in his 

 Memoirs. He tells us : 



" At the period when it was expected he should have 

 composed them [the lectures],! have heard him walking 

 at intervals in his room till one or two o'clock in the 

 morning, and I have on the following day, at an early 

 hour, seen the papers on the subject of his art which had 

 been written the preceding night. 1 have liad the rude 

 manuscript from himself in his own handwriting, in order to 

 make a fair copy from it for him to read in public. I 

 have seen the manuscript also, after it had been revised 

 by Dr. Johnson, who has sometimes altered it to a wrong 

 meaning, from his total ignorance of the subject and of 

 art ; htit never, to my knowledge, saw the marks of Burke's 

 pen in any of the manuscripts. 



As your pages will give currency to this base 

 McCormick fiction, it is but proper that they 

 should also contain its full and ample refutation, 

 although those who are well acquainted with the 

 literature of the last half-century will be aware 

 that it had not the slightest foundation in fact, and 

 that it had been more than once satisfactorily ex- 

 posed and answered. S. W. Singkr. 



Mickleham. 



Two statements, to the effect that Burke was 

 the author of those Discourses, have lately been 

 quoted in " N. & Q." They do not, indeed, pro- 

 fess to rest upon any authority ; and the internal 



No. 320.] 



evidence furnished by the Discourses themselves 

 is amply sufficient to disprove such an unfounded 

 assertion. But I may be allowed to state that the 

 original MSS., in Sir Joshua's own handwriting, 

 are still preserved at Great Torrington, Devon, 

 where Sir Joshua's nephew, and my maternal 

 grandfather, the Rev. John Palmer, resided. 



Frederic T. Colby. 



Exeter College, Oxford. 



[Mr. R. Arnott has kindlj' pointed out to us that, in 

 the Art Union Journal for 1844, at p. 45., will be found a 

 letter from R. B. Haydon in reply to The Times of Dec. 26, 

 1843 ; wherein, incorporated in a review of the Life of 

 Wilkle, this question had been mooted. Haj'don com- 

 pletely demolishes the argument, both positively and 

 inferentially. And, at p. 67., adduces further proof in a 

 letter communicated to him by a then living niece of Sir 

 Joshua's.] 



THE " CODEX VATICANUS." 



(Vol. xii., p. 422.) 



By omitting one word in my letter inserted in 

 "N. &Q." (No. 318.), I seem to claim to have 

 done a great deal more than is the case. Instead 

 of " one who has examined and collated personally 

 almost every known Greek MS.," I should have 

 said, " almost every known ancient Greek MS.," 

 and this would show the true state of the case. 



In reference to some parts of Mr. Ashpitel's 

 letter to The Times, written on the same day as 

 mine, I may be allowed to remark that the date 

 of the writing of the whole of the Apocalypse is 

 considerably later than the tenth century, in which 

 he puts it. 



The text of the Complutensian Greek Testa- 

 ment is peculiarly unlike that of the Vatican 

 MS. Indeed, it may be regarded as pretty 

 certain, from the manner in which Bombasius 

 and Sepulveda mention the Vatican MS. in their 

 correspondence with Erasmus, and from the 

 allusion made to it by Stunica, that the last- 

 named scholar and his fellow-labourers at Com- 

 plutum could not have employed it. 



As to Cardinal Mai's having pointed to what 

 appeared like the date a.d. 70, at the end of one 

 of the books, I suspect that it must have been one 

 of those jokes on the part of the Cardinal, in which 

 he sometimes indulged. Very likely that there is 

 at the end of some of the Old Testament books 

 KATA TOTC O ; and that the numeral 5 (70) was 

 what the Cardinal pointed out, asking playfully if 

 that were not the date a.d, 70. I remember 

 hearing Cardinal Mai mention a story about some 

 English traveller who satisfactorily accounted for 

 the absence of the Apocalypse, on the ground that 

 the MS. was written in the year of the destruction 

 of Jerusalem, a.d. 70, about twenty-five years 

 before the existence of the Book of Revelation. 



S. Prideaux Tregelles. 



6. Portland Square, Plymouth. 



