i.AWLOR — Tile Cathach of St. Columha. 39f 



APPENDIX II. 



Palabographical Notes. 



By PEOFESSOE W. M. LINDSAY. 



I. The Script of the Cathach. 



Dj;. Lawlor has asked for a palaeographical note on the Cathach, and 

 has sent me photographs of ten of its pages. My own inspection of the 

 MS. was made in very cursory fashion some twenty or thirty years ago. 

 Henry Bradshaw's way of keeping a MS. beside him for a month or more, and 

 poring o^er each line, each word, each letter, is unfortunately impracticable ; 

 although it is the only way to wrest from these old documents all their 

 secrets. I must be content with stating what can be gleaned from an 

 inspection of the ten photographs. 



The gist of the following remarks is that, in our present state of know- 

 ledge of early Irish palaeography, there seems to be no valid reason why we 

 should refuse to the script of the Cathach the early date which Dr. Lawlor's 

 theory assigns to it. Further, that the nature of the script is in keeping with 

 the theory ; for it is a half-uncial script reduced in size and made more 

 flowing. In other words, the formal book-hand of the time seems to have 

 been modified so as to enable the writer to get through his task more quickly 

 and to use less parchment. It might be objected that the theory would lead 

 us to expect St. Columba to have discarded any form of book -hand, and to 

 have used instead the cursive hand of every- day correspondence, of memoranda, 

 hasty jottings, and the like ; or at least to have shortened his task by a free 

 employment of abbreviation-symbols. All our MSS. of the grammarian 

 Marius Victorinus (edited in vol. vi of Keil's " Grammatici Latini ") come from 

 an ancient (fifth or sixth century) copy which swarmed with symbols, many 

 of which had become obsolete by the time of the Carolingian transcribers. 

 The younger contemporary of Columba, Columban,the founder of Bobbio, left 

 in the monastery-library a MS. of his (?) Commentary on the Psalms, whose old- 

 fashioned abbreviation-symbols puzzled the Bobbio transcribers in the eighth 

 century. Why should not Columba, too, it may be objected, if he were 

 pressed for time, have used abbreviation ? This objection does not seem to 

 be fatal to the theory. We need not suppose the Saint to have been so 

 terribly pressed for time. We may believe that he wished to keep his 

 transcript as near to the formal book-hand as he conveniently could, and to 

 make it fairly reproduce the character of the original (with its "cola et 

 commata," Jerome's " notae criticae," etc.). Besides, a very hasty copy would 



