BOOK III, .... we carried our boxes, paper, and string, and packed them all. Before ten in the morning they were on their way to ARCHEOLO- Alexandria.' But, as will be seen in the sequel, the monks were too crafty for Mr. TATTAM to cope with. GROUP OF GISTS AND TISCHEN DORF'S VISIT IN 1844. PACHO'S NEGOTIA TION FOR VERY OF THE HELD BY THE In 1844, TISCHENDORF visited the monasteries already explored by CURZON and TATTAM. His account reproduces the old characteristics:-Manuscripts heaped indiscriminately together, lying on the ground, or thrown into large baskets, beneath masses of dust.. The excessive suspicion of these monks renders it extremely difficult to induce them to produce their MSS., in spite of the extreme penury which surrounds them. . . . . But much might yet be found to reward the labour of the searcher.' In truth, the monks, poor and simple as they sometimes seemed to be, had taken very sufficient care to keep enough of literary treasures in their hands to reward further researches.' Nearly half of their collection seems to have been withheld. A certain clever Mr. PACHO now entered on the scene as a negotiator for the obtainment or recovery of the missing treasures of the tombs.' They had been virtually purchased before, but the Lords of the Treasury very wisely re-opened the public purse, and at length secured for the Nation an inestimable possession. The new accession completed, or went far towards completing, many MSS. which before See page 622, were tantalizingly imperfect. It supplied a second ancient copy of the famous Ignatian Epistles (to St. Polycarp, to the Ephesians, and to the Romans); many fragments of palimpsest manuscripts of great antiquity, and among them the greater part of St. Luke's Gospel in Greek; and about four thousand lines of the Iliad, written in a fine square uncial letter, apparently not later than the sixth century. The total number of volumes thus added to the in this Chapter. previous Nitrian Collections were calculated, roundly, to be BOOK III. from a hundred and forty to a hundred and fifty. Chap. IV. ARCHEOLO EXPLORERS. WILLIAM AND HIS ORIENTAL That the rich accession to our sacred literature, thus GISTS AND made amidst many obstacles, should be turned speedily to public advantage, two conditions had to be fulfilled. CUREton Skilful labour had first to be employed in the arrangement of a mass of fragments. Scholars competently prepared, by previous studies in Oriental literature and more especially in Syriac, must then get to work on their transcription, their gloss, and their publication. It could scarcely have been expected, beforehand, that any one man would be able to undertake both tasks, and to keep them, for some years to come, well abreast. well abreast. The fact, however, proved to be so. The right man was already in the right place for the work that was to be done. The late William CURETON had entered the service of the Trustees of the British Museum in 1837, at the age of twenty-nine, when he had been already for about eight years in holy orders. He was a native of Westbury, in Shropshire. His education, begun at Newport School, had been matured at Christ-Church, Oxford. He had been just about to enter himself at Christ-Church in the ordinary way, when his father died, suddenly, leaving the family fortunes under considerable embarrassment. CURETON, and a brother of his, showed the metal they were both made of, by instantly changing their youthful plans. That the whole of the diminished patrimony might be at their mother's sole disposal, William CURETON went to Oxford as a servitor. His brother, instead of waiting for his expected commission in the Army, enlisted as a private dragoon. And certainly, in the issue, neither of these young men lost any dignity'-in any sense of that word— Book III, ANOTHER GROUP OF ARCHEOLO GISTS AND EXPLORERS. CURETON'S BRITISH on account of the step so unselfishly taken at their start in life. William CURETON began his literary labours as Coadjutor-Under-Librarian in old Bodley. Dr. GAISFORD introduced him to Dr. BANDINEL, in 1834, with the words: I bring you a good son. He will make a good librarian.' It was at Oxford that he laid the substantial foundation of his Oriental studies. After three years, he followed the fashion already set him by some of the best and ablest officers the Bodleian has ever had-ELLIS, BABER, and H. O. CoxE, for example-by transferring, for a time, his services from the great Library of Oxford to that of London. His first (or nearly his first) Museum task was to set to work on the cataloguing of the Arabic and Persian MSS. In 1842, he began his earliest Oriental publication (undertaken for the Oriental Text Society,' to be mentioned presently), namely, AL SHARASTANI's' Book of Religious and of Philosophical Sects.' At the British Museum, he became quite as notable for the amiability of his character, and the genial frankness of his manners, as for his scholarly attainments and his power of authorship. I have a vivid recollection of my own introduction to him, in the February of 1839, and of the impression made on me by his kindly and cordial greeting. When I noted that pleasant face, which beamed with good nature as well as with intellect, I instantly appreciated the force of the words used by my introducer: Let me make you known,' said he, to my father-confessor.' I thought the choice to be obviously a felicitous one. Not less vivid is my memory of the delight Mr. CURETON manifested on receiving, within the Museum vaults, the first importation from the Nitrian Desert. The sight of such a mass of torn, disorderly, and dirty fragments, would have appalled many Chap. IV. GROUP OF men not commonly afraid of labour, but to William BOOK III, CURETON the scholarly ardour of discovery made the task, ANOTHER from the first, a pleasure. When successive fresh arrivals gave new hope that many gaps in the manuscripts of GISTS AND earliest importation would, in course of time, be filled up, the laborious pleasure ripened into joy. ARCHEOLO EXPLORERS. TARY CON DITION OF THE SYRIAC 1843. The collection, obtained by the long succession of labours already narrated, reached the British Museum on the first of May, 1843. When the cases were opened, very few indeed of the MSS. were perfect. Nearly two FRAGMENhundred volumes had been torn into separate leaves, and then mixed up together, by blind chance and human stupidity. It was a perplexing sight. But the eyes that looked PORTED IN on it belonged to a seeing head. Even into a little chaos like this, almost hopeless as at the first glance it seemed, the learning, assiduity, and patience of Mr. CHurton gradually brought order. Of necessity, the task took a long time. First came the separation of the fragments of different works, and then the arrangement of the leaves into volumes, with no aid to pagination or catchwords. With translations of extant Greek works, the collection of their originals gave, of course, great help. But in a multitude of cases every leaf had to be read and closely studied. Within about eighteen months of the reception of the MSS., Mr. CURETON had ascertained the number of volumes -reckoning books made up of fragments, as well as complete works to amount to three hundred and seventeen, of which two hundred and forty-six were on vellum, and seventy on paper; all in Syriac or Aramaic, except one volume of Coptic fragments. With the forty-nine volumes previously acquired, an addition was thus made to the MS. Department of the National Library of three hundred and sixty-six volumes. Many of these volumes contain two, BOOK III, GROUP OF GISTS AND DR. CURE TON'S PUB- three, or four distinct works, of different dates, bound together, so that probably, in the whole, there were of manuscripts and parts of manuscripts, upwards of one thousand, written in all parts of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, and at periods which range from the year 411 to the year 1292. Of the specific character and contents of some of the choicest of these MSS., mention will be made hereafter. For several years, the labour on the Syriac fragments did but alternate with that on the larger body of the Arabic MSS., a classed catalogue of which Mr. CURETON pubLITERATURE. lished in 1846,-only a month or two after he had contri ARABIC buted to the Quarterly Review a deeply interesting and masterly article on the Syriac discoveries. This paper was quickly followed by his first edition of the Three Epistles of St. Ignatius (I, to Polycarp; II, to the Ephesians; III, to the Romans). In an able preface, he contended that, of these genuine Epistles, all previous recensions were, to a considerable extent, interpolated, garbled, and spurious; and also that the other Ignatian Epistles, so-called, are entirely supposititious. In the year 1870 it need hardly be said either that this publication excited much controversy, or that competent opinion is still divided on some parts of the subject. But on two points there has never been any controversy whatever :-As an editor, William CURETON displayed brilliant ability; as a student of theology, he was no less distinguished by a single-minded search after truth. He was never one of those noisy controversialists of whom Walter LANDOR once said, so incisively, that they were less angry with their opponents for withstanding the truth, than for doubting their own claims to be the channels and the * In-unless a memory more than thirty years old deceive me—that noble masterpiece of English prose, the Citation of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing' (1835). |