250 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



was surely corrected before he wrote the following iiestra. Again, at Isiv. 9 

 we have the reading tcrminos terre, with an erased m after the first r of terre, 

 and another erased letter at the end of the word. Plainly the scribe 

 detected himself, first in repeating tcrminos, and again in a second error after 

 terre : both mistakes were at once corrected. In xxxvi. 37 we find rcliepic 

 for reliquiae, in v. 38 reliquiae with an erasure after qu. No doubt in the 

 latter place the scribe was repeating his former error, and had written 

 relique: he erased e, and after the erasure wrote iac. In xl. 10, viagnificalat, 

 the letter h seems to have been corrected from t, and the ne.xt letter appears 

 to be written in an erasure. If so, the scribe wrote marjnificat, and perhaps 

 began the word super. Then he discovered his mistake, and altered the 

 former word to magnificahcd, carrying sv^yerover to the next line. Similarly at 

 si. 7 he was on the point of omitting the t of ingrcdiebatur , when he dis- 

 covered and corrected his error. In Ixiv. 4 uerlruvi seems to have beeir 

 written, the second u being afterwards changed to a, m erased, and the first 

 letter of iniquorum written in the erasure. A curious mistake was apparently 

 made in xcv. 6 : the sciibe wrote pulchntusp (under the influence of conspcctn : 

 thus omitting -do in con- ?), tlien erased s, and altered f into d. This seems 

 to be anotlier instance of a mistake set right immediately after it was made. 

 In civ. 35, 37, the first e of coruvi, eos was originally written i ; from which 

 we may infer that the scribe began to write illorum, illos, and in each case 

 checked himself in time. In Ixxi. 9 the / of aethiopcs seems to have been 

 altered into y : if so, tlie correction was made before the next letter was 

 penned. 



This investigation, though it does not pass in review all the errors of our 

 scribe, may suffice to indicate the type of mistake to which he was most 

 addicted. It leads also, if I do not err, to two probable conclusions. The 

 first of these is, that the manuscript was not compared with the exemplar 

 after it was completed, but that at least a large proportion of the corrections 

 which appear in it were made by the scribe in the course of the work 

 of transcription. Some may have been made at a later time ; but 

 most of these could have been effected by an intelligent reader without the 

 help of manuscript authority. Our second conclusion is this : The rapid 

 detection of error, to which the manuscript ir.self bears witness, forbids the 

 supposition, which the considerable number of blunders which it contains 

 might suggest, that the scribe was either incompetent or naturally careless. 

 On the contrary, the impression left on my mind, by tlie character of his 

 hand, by his errors, and by his corrections, is that he was a penman of more 

 than average excellence, who could not write rapidly, but who was working 

 at unusually high pressure when he made this ti'anscript of the Psalter. 



