Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/447

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 439 are of another kind and seem to be perverted accounts of actual incidents. The strings of miracles make the lives tedious reading ; and in the life of Leutfred Dr. Levison has boldly cut the knot by omitting many of them. As a reviewer who has to read the texts I cannot regret this ; but it is a good general principle that an editor of a text should publish the whole of it, since, though parts of it may be of no value to those for whom he is specially writing, they 'may interest inquirers in another field. In the case of miracles it is of interest to note how the same stories are found in the most unlikely places ; the story of Leutfred and the flies (p. 15), for instance, reminds us (though Dr. Levison does not note it) of a well-known story in the Acts of John (ed. Zahn, p. 225), and the story of Pardulf's escape from the Arabs (p. 33) closely resembles a story which John of Ephesus tells of his master Maro the Stylite {De Beat. Orient., ch. 4). As regards the scope of the work, the expression ' aevum Merovingicum ' is apparently treated as including the whole of the fifth century ; but, since this widening gives us the gem of the number, the life of Germanus of Auxerre, we cannot complain of it. The work of the editors is too well known to need commendation from me, and it is hardly necessary to say that the introductions and notes are, as in previous numbers, a monument of industry and learning, while all who know the fearful Latin in which the lives are written will appreciate the difficulty of constructing a text out of the huge mass of manuscripts, almost all of which have been collated by the editors or by other scholars for them. Of the biographers only Alcuin (who lived under the Caroline revival and, being an Englishman, knew it merely as an acquired literary language) writes tolerable Latin ; even Fortunatus, who seems from his verses to have had a classical training, writes as barbarously as the others ; and, as we find a similar inconsistency in Paul the Deacon, it would seem to follow that the writers did not write badly from mere illiteracy, but conformed to the prose style of the time. If so, a careful study of the literature might reveal rules of accidence and syntax hitherto unknown, and thus make it easier to restore the texts, and enable us to understand passages which are now unintelligible or misunderstood ; but it is doubt- ful if the gain would be worth the time and labour. Meanwhile the editors' notes on obscure passages, and the parts of the introductions which deal with the language, are most illuminating, though we cannot expect even them to make everything clear. Thus we get no light upon ' se lacrimare profusae ' (387. 15), which is to me unintelligible, while on the other hand it seems unnecessary to explain ' inconsideranter ' (389. 12). In such a mass of notes there must sometimes be difficulties in the references ; but in the life of Germanus of Auxerre I fear most readers will be puzzled by the constant references to ' N. Arch. 1.1.', which refer to Dr. Levison's article in the Neues Archiv, xxix, cited in the first note, though in the meantime many other references to the Neues Archiv have been given. The points on which I can criticize the results at which the editors have arrived are few indeed. The date (894) given for the translation of Rigobert (p. 78) is clearly wrong on the showing of Dr. Levison's own note. Such ceremonies always took place on a Sunday, and the year must