198 EICARDUS CORINENSIS. 



Benedictine of the fourteenth century. The Copenhagen manuscript 

 has utterly vanished ; or rather, appears to have been mythical from 

 the first ; and no fragment, or reference to any other copy, has ever been 

 seen or heard of. Dr. Stukeley's first idea was to secure the original 

 for the British Museum ; but Bertram had a plausible story to account 

 for his declining either to lend or sell it, when it passed, as he affirmed, 

 into his own hands. It was, according to him, part of a large MS. 

 stolen out of an English library, by one who had been wild in his 

 youth ; and whose mode of showing his later penitence was that " he 

 gave it to Bertram at Copenhagen, and enjoined him to keep it secret." 

 On this the conjecture has been founded that the Bertram MS. may 

 have been purloined from the Cottonian Library at the fire of 1733, 

 carried to Copenhagen, and so made the basis of the published tractate. 

 It is at any rate worth notice, among the other consistencies of this 

 story, that the mode adopted by Bertram for keeping his confidant's 

 secret was to communicate it forthwith to the most likely of all English- 

 men to publish it to the world. Had this been followed up by the 

 restoration, or even the sale, of the stolen manuscript, it would have 

 satisfied all minds; but, as the excuse accepted by Dr. Stukeley and 

 his contemporaries for preventing anyone obtaining a sight of the 

 original, it reads now as the shallow invention of an impostor. 



But again it is suggested by those who still cling to the possible 

 genuineness of the Itinerary, that Bertram may have so altered, patched, 

 and tampered with, the copy he sent to Dr. Stukeley, to adapt it to the 

 tastes of his correspondent, that he was tempted to destroy the original. 

 Nor is there wanting a hint on which to found such an hypothesis. 

 Mr. Bertram's monk was introduced to Dr. Stukeley as Richard of 

 "Westminster. The Doctor thereupon betook himself to the Abbey 

 Librar}'-, and was able to tell his Copenhagen correspondent that he 

 had found traces enough of the old chronicler, Richard of Ciren- 

 cester, a monk of Westminster; whereupon Bertram's antique MS. 

 at once adopts the change; audits title expands into '^ Ricardi Cori- 

 nensis Monachi Westmonasteriensis De Situ Britannise." The title is 

 of a modern form ; for the old monk who wrote the " Speculum 

 Historiale " styles himself " Ricardus de Cirencestria." But the 

 Copenhagen MS. had a wonderful adaptability; and when printed, 

 there, at Dr. Stukeley's urgent advice, in 1757, it embodied sundry 

 variations from the text he had edited from Bertram's own transcript, 

 including differences in the distances of the Itinerary, and a map so 



