158 LEAVES THEY HAVE TOUCHED. 



proper nepuona-i or lessons indicated by conventional abbreviations 

 to which correspond similar signs on the margin, and at the top and 

 bottom of the pages in the preceding MS. The Calendar begins with 

 Sep. 1, and the personage named for commemoration on that day is 

 Saint Simeon Stylites. Both in the iziva^ and the ■ iJ-fj^oXoyiov the 

 initial letters of numerous words seem to have been written in red 

 ink which has now become very faint. 



London experts assure us that the copy of the Four Gospels before 

 us was written j)rior to 1200. We might easily conceive it to hai^e 

 been written a century earlier, so closely does it correspond in cha- 

 racter with facsimile specimens which I have seen of MSS. in the- 

 British Museum, said to be of the eleventh century. Not knowing 

 its history, it is impossible to say with any definiteness whose hands 

 may have turned over its pages. It is a chronological possibility 

 that those of Thomas h, Beckett may have done so. Or, a few years 

 later, it may have been brought home fi'om the Holy Land, bright 

 and fresh, by some bibliophile pilgrim in the retinue of Hubert Fitz- 

 Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, companion of Richard Cceur de Lion in 

 the Third Crusade. More probably, however, some more recent 

 English traveller, some tourist to Mount Athos — some Curzon, bent 

 on exploring the neglected ' treasures of the twenty-one monasteries 

 of the Holy Mountain — purchased it of a needy Abbot there, and 

 brought it to England with other literary spoil. In 1833, Mr. 

 Curzon (afterwards Lord de la Zouche) found numerous ancient MS. 

 copies of the Gospels in the monasteries of Egypt, Syria, and the 

 ^gean, and brought many of them with him to Eagland. And 

 since his visit, other travellers have gone over the same ground, and. 

 made similar forays. The latest discoverer of eminence in fields of 

 this kind is Professor Tischendorf, of Leipsic, who first in 1844 

 lighted on a part, and in 1857 recovered the whole, of a MS. con- 

 taining the Old Testament in Greek, and the entire ISfew Testament, 

 all written, it is confidently held, in the early half of the fourth cen- , 

 tiny. The scene of Tischendorf's fortunate find was the Convent of 

 St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. The MS. thus rescued is now known 

 as the Codex Sinaiticus, and is in the possession of the Emperor of 

 Russia, who has had copies of it made in. facsimile, and in ordinary 

 Greek type. In 1833, such relics of bygone centuries were not uni- 

 versally appreciated among the monasteries of the East. This is 

 Curzon's description of a sight which met his eye in the dilapidated 



