live to enjoy the ownership of them long.

To find, as the late Mr. Greenwell of Durham found, a leaf of a
sixth-century Latin Bible from Wearmouth or Jarrow (or perhaps even from
Cassiodorus's library) in a curiosity shop, is a chance that comes to
few. But I have always lamented that I did not pass through the streets
of Orleans at the time (not many years back) when an illustrated Greek
MS. of the Gospels on purple vellum and in gold and silver uncials was
exposed for sale in a shop window. A French officer had picked it up at
Sinope, and used it to keep dried plants in. However, it went to its
rightful and proper home, the Bibliotheque Nationale.

It is getting on for thirty years now since a small parish library in
Suffolk, founded in 1700, gave to the world the book of the Gospels
owned by St. Margaret of Scotland (at Oxford), and the unique life of
St. William, the boy martyr of Norwich, and Nicholas Roscarrock's
Register of British Saints (both at Cambridge). Not as long since, in a
private library in Italy, some leaves were found of the early MS. (from
Hersfeld Abbey in Germany) of the minor writings of Tacitus from which
all our extant fifteenth-century copies descend. Still more recently,
among a collection of scraps of MSS., a half leaf of an eleventh or
twelfth century MS. in Welsh was detected (a very great rarity); its
generous finder (the late Mr. A. G. W. Murray, librarian of Trinity
College) gave it to the Cambridge University Library, and thus added one
more to the already remarkable collection of bits of early Welsh which
Cambridge owns. It deals with the dry topic of finding Easter, but
linguistically it is above price.

And now for an example which shows the odd wanderings of _texts_. There
is a volume at Vienna, from Bobbio, made up of palimpsest leaves from
many MSS., Biblical and classical. Two of these, apparently from one
book, stand next to each other. They have only recently been deciphered;
they are in Latin uncials of the fifth century. One of them is from the
Apocalypse of Thomas, a book named in an old list of Apocryphal
writings, but thought until a few years ago to be hopelessly lost. We
now know complete MSS. of it at Munich and a fragment at Verona, as well
as an Anglo-Saxon version in the Vercelli MS. The other Vienna leaf is
from an equally apocryphal "epistle of the Apostles," never mentioned by
old writers, but seemingly of the second century. It gives a dialogue
between our L