236 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



off and colloquialized into cela m^etonne ! The words are a reference 

 to Gen. xxxii. 29pai ete w spere pe : the girl was going to explain the 

 mystical meaning of her name Stephanw, so the writer's mind at once 

 reverted to the well-known incident of Jacob, in the passage referred 

 to, from which the Coptic words here used are directly taken. 



21. Here is a nice moral to put into the mouth of a young martyr 

 sermonizing his pagan father! — Si JJrie avait ohei d David qui etait 

 son roi pourtant et voulait le r envoy er d, sa propre maison, le pecM de 

 David eut eU cache et Dieu rCeM pas, par vengeance, verse le sang 

 d^ Urie. One would have to get rid of a great many habits of 

 morals and memory before one could gulp down such a morsel as 

 this presented by M. Dotiriant, that God shed the blood of Uriah in 

 vengeance for the latter's not having consented to &c. ! But the 

 Coptic text has not said so ; the last clause is [159, x] nere pjoeis 

 najikba an pe mpesnof nhwrias, i.e. 'God would not have 

 avenged the blood of Uriah'. 



22. Particularly disagreeable are the minor blunders, because it is 

 just these small details of grammatical structure which give point and 

 definiteness to the language : the prepositions, the regents, the relative 

 particles, are the essential ligatures without which the skeleton is 

 liable to tumble down into a mere heap of bones. 



Cf. the following passage [189, 3] : — 



6 pathet insensi 



aktT ma iiimai tenw qui me donnes V occasion 



etra»iaje iininiak de retorquer ta folic. 

 kata mntathet. 



Well, ti means 'to give', and ma means 'place', so that do?mes 

 V occasion seems to result ; but, it would not govern mmai ! 



Here it is the ignorance of the case governed by the verb ti which 

 has brought about the absurdity. It was not ti ma at all; but the 

 Greek root riyuav used according to Coptic usage, ak-tima mmai [for 

 inmoi], "thou hast lionoured me to let me speak with thee". The 

 point was that Victor was about to snub the governor, who had been 

 his military subordinate, for daring to speak to him in such haughty 

 language; adding, a propos de quoi es-tu devenu aussi orgueilleux? 

 It is just the opposite of 190, 4, mpe paeiot Kara^iov mmok 

 holos esaje nmmak. 



23. Here is a passage which certainly deserved a little more conside- 

 ration from an Editor ! The martyr in his aTroXoyta for disobeying his 

 father's order tells of Abraham, how his disobedience to his father was 



