181?7.] on Greek and Latin Palseograpliy. 387 



earlier period. Another famous manuscript of the same time is also 

 a copy of Virgil, known as the " Schedas Vaticanse," interesting 

 from having a large series of illustrative paintings ; the writing not 

 quite so compact and regular. And of still greater interest is a third 

 Virgilian manuscript, the Laurentian Virgil of Florence, in the same 

 style of writing but of later date ; we can, almost with certainty, 

 place it in the middle of the fifth century, for it contains a note 

 of revision in the year 494. Ihe rustic capital writing of these 

 three examples is in its full strength. To see what it became in its 

 first decadence, we may glance at the manuscript of Prudentius at 

 Paris, written about the year 500, in which the character, though still 

 good, is artificial ; and an instance of pure imitation, as late as about 

 the year 800, is afibrded by the manuscript known as the Utrecht 

 Psalter.* 



The evidence of the employment of the square capital for sump- 

 tuous manuscripts is more scanty. No volume in this style has 

 survived ; but a few leaves from different manuscripts are still in 

 existence. At St. Gall, in Switzerland, there are the remains of 

 what must have been a manuscript of immense size, for each page 

 contained only nineteen lines. Again, the author chosen for this 

 distinction is Virgil, and the manuscript may liavo been written early 

 in the fifth century. 



The third class of majuscule writing is the uncial; and the 

 earliest example of it is probably to be found in the palimpsest 

 fragments of Cicero ' de Kepublica,' of the fourth century, in the 

 Vatican Library. Here again the manuscript when perfect must 

 have been of unusual size. The upper writing is the commentary of 

 St. Augustine on the Psalms, written late in the seventh century. The 

 fragmentary coj)y of the Gospels at Vercelli in North Italy, of the 

 end of the fourth century, shows the uncial hand in a perfect and 

 vigorous form ; and the manuscript of Livy in the Imperial Library of 

 Vienna is one of the best examples of the characters in the fifth 

 century. For the three following centuries, the uncial was destined 

 to be the chief literary hand of Western Europe ; but we must take 

 leave of it at this point to trace in outline the development of the 

 small or minuscule hand which was to supersede it. 



We return to the early Roman cursive hand, and take up the 

 thread with the Dacian waxen tablets of the second century, selecting 

 one of them of the year ISD."]" 



This tablet originally consisted of three leaves, and, counting six 

 pages to the tablet, we open it to t-how pages 2 and 3 of the triptych. 

 On these pages are inscribed, in Roman cursive writing, a deed record- 

 ing the purchase of a slave girl. When the two leaves were closed, a 



* For facsimiles of these and other majuscule MSS., see Wattenbach and 

 Zangemeister, ' Exempla Codd. Lat. litteris majusculis scriptoruui,' 1876, 1879; 

 and tke Facaimiles of the Pal geographical Society. 



t ' Corpus luscriptionum Latinarum,' iii. pt. 2. 



