Hkmphill — The Gospels of Mac Regal of Birr. 3 



write out the very words of the CTOspels ; and famoas indeed must have been 

 the artists who tiirned out such magnificent books as the Gospels of Durrow 

 and Kells, with several others of equal textual but less artistic merit, as the 

 Books of Armagh, Mulling, and Uinima. Now the great majority of the 

 Celtic-Latin Gospels were written in Ireland. The Books of Lindisfarne and 

 St. Chad are of course amongst the notable exceptions ; and perhaps the 

 angelic^ Book of Kells was written in lona ; but the others named above 

 were all written in Ireland. In The Annals of the Four Masters occwc the 

 names of many scribes ; but, alas, owing to the ravages of the Northmen, 

 and the decay of time, we possess no specimens of their handwrituag. In the 

 case of MacEiagail we are more fortunate, for the sumptuous copy of the 

 Gospels exhibited in the Bodleian Library under the notation MS. Aiwt. D. ii. 

 19, is a product of his skill and patience. On the verso of its 169th leaf, it 

 contains this subscription : — 



Et intellegerit 

 " Macregol depin istam narratio 

 Cxit hoc evange neni orat pro 

 Hum : Quicum Macreguil scripto 



que legerit ri."- 



The honour of having vindicated the penmanship of this splendid MS. for 

 that MacEiagail who was the scribe as well as the bishop and abbot of Birr 

 and died A.D. 820, belongs to his distinguished fellovz-countryman, the 

 Eev. Dr. Charles O'Conor, who, in 1814, published at Buckingham, at the 

 expense of its munificent Duke, his great work on ancient Irish writers.' Up 

 to that time the MS. was supposed to have been written in England, like the 

 Book of Lindisfarne, which it so much resembles ; and many English writers, 

 such as Thomas Astle,* Humphrey Wanley,^ and J". 0. Westwood," praised it as 

 one of the mostpreeious of their national monuments! Of course the word-for-word 

 Anglo-Saxon interlineation gives to this MS. the greatest value as an authority 

 for the origin of the English language, second only indeed to the Book of 

 Lindisfarne. This neat interlineation of MacRegol's stately lines was 

 executed by two English scribes, Farman and Owun, who were apparently 

 inmates of the Monastery of Harewood, on the marches of the kingdoms 

 of Mercia and Northumbria, at the end of the tenth century. From their 



1 Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, v, p. 123. 



- MacEegol's knowledge of I/atin was Hniiteil. 



5 Script. Vet. Hibern., i, ccxxxi. 



* The Origin and Progress of Writing, p. 99 ; also Tab. xvi, p. 100. 



' Libroriiin Vett. Septentrionaliiim qui in Angliae Bibliothecis extant (Ox., 1705), pp. SI, 82. 



f' Facsimiles and Miniatures of Ai/i//o-Saxon and Irish MSS. (Lonil., 1S6S), p. 53. 



[1*] 



