gland as gifts to our
Sovereigns. One was the well-known Codex Alexandrinus (A), given to
Charles I. in 1628 by Cyril Lucar, the reforming Patriarch of
Constantinople. Of the other I shall take leave to say more. It was that
known as the Cottonian Genesis, which was brought over by two Greek
Bishops "from Philippi" and presented to Henry VIII. It was a
sixth-century copy of the Book of Genesis, written in uncial letters and
illustrated, we are told, with 250 pictures. Queen Elizabeth passed it
on to her tutor, Sir John Fortescue, and he to Sir Robert Cotton, the
collector of a library of which we shall hear more in the sequel, and in
that library it remained (when not out on loan) till Saturday, October
23, 1731. On that day a fire broke out in Ashburnham House in
Westminster (where the Cotton and Royal Libraries were then kept), and
the bookcase in which the Genesis was suffered horribly. The Cotton
MSS.--for I may as well explain this matter now as later--were kept in
presses, each of which had a bust of a Roman Emperor on the top. They
ran from Julius to Domitian, and were supplemented by Cleopatra and
Faustina. Augustus and Domitian had but one shelf each (Augustus
contained charters, drawings, and the like; Domitian was originally,
perhaps, a small case over a doorway); the others had usually six
shelves, lettered from A to F, and the books in each shelf were numbered
from i. onwards in Roman figures. The Genesis was Otho, B vi., and the
three presses of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius were those in which the fire
did most mischief. No complete leaf is left of Genesis; there are bits
of blackened text and pictures, a few of which strayed to the library of
the Baptist College at Bristol. The text had been examined by competent
scholars for editions of the Greek Old Testament, and we are able to
judge of its value; but of the pictures, alas! no list or description
had been made. Still, something is known. An eminent French polymath,
the Sieur de Peiresc (whose life by P. Gassendi is well worth reading),
borrowed the book from Cotton, and had careful copies of one or two of
the illustrations made for him, and these exist. And a further
interesting fact has come out: by the help of our scanty relics a
student of art, Professor Tikkanen, of Helsingfors, in Finland, was able
to show that the designers of a long series of mosaic pictures from
Genesis in St. Mark's at Venice must have had before them either the
Cotton Genesis or