LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUCHED. 155 



■marked for insertion the words, "qiiia non habebant altitudinem 

 terrse ; sole an tern orto sestuerunt et" — the second "quia non habe- 

 bant" having led the eye asti-ay. Copying slowly and mechanically 

 day after day, the scribe doubtless became listless now and then. 

 As to the age of the volume, Messrs. Ellis and Green, the well-known 

 English and Foreign booksellers, of 33 King Street, Covent Garden, 

 experts in respect of such matters, state that, "in niliety-nine cases 

 out of a hundred, the date of a MS. can be judged with certainty 

 from the character of the handwriting, the formation of certain 

 letters, the use of contractions, and various other points familiar to 

 any one who sees many such specimens. From such data we have 

 no hesitation in repeating that the MS. in question [i.e., The Quatuor 

 Evangelia now before us] was beyond doiibt written before 1400." 

 " Repeating" refers to the statement made by Messrs. Ellis and 

 Green in their advertisement of this MS. in the Saturday Review. 

 Supposing, then, its writing to have taken place about midway in 

 the fourteenth century, it is within the bounds of possibility that this 

 •dentical copy of the Four Gospels may have been used by Wycliffe 

 while engaged in his translation of the Scriptures, or that its leaves 

 may have been those from which Robert Langlande transcribed the 

 Latin texts, which appear every here and there in the Vision and 

 Creed of Piers Ploughman. On the first folio are memoranda of 

 Libraries to which this MS. has in its days belonged, or been pre- 

 sented. One of them was that of a monastery of St. Andrew, but 

 the name of the place where, I have not been able satisfactorily to 

 decipher. 



(2.) I next describe an ancient MS. copy of the Four Gospels in 

 Greek. It is a small thick quarto, five by six inches. The covers 

 are of wood, perhaps cedar or cypress, very thick but light. A thin 

 leather is stretched over the wood. A number of holes pierce both 

 substances ; once the receptacles of pins or rivets which, at the 

 four corners, fastened to the cover metal bosses, holding, it may be, 

 each a precious stone ; whilst in the middle of each cover there has 

 evidently been an ornamental figure ; that on the first, appears, from 

 traces left, to have been a crucifix. The volume was ^originally 

 fastened, not by clasps, but, by strings of which there are remains 

 inside : on the edge of the left hand cover there are metal pins to 

 which the strings were looped or tied. The wood of the right-hand 

 cover is somewhat decayed towards the top^ The leaves of the MS. 



