Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/320

 262 NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. iv. SEPT. so, 1905. conjunction with his brother Horace, of 'Ke- jected Addresses.' They are the following :— Virgil, whose epic song enthralls (And who in song is greater ?), Throughout his Trojan hero calls Now Piu-s, and now Pater. But when, the worst intent to brave, With sentiments that pain us, Queen Dido meets him in the cave, He dubs him Dux Trojamis. And well he alters here the word, For in thi» station, sure, PiiH JEneas were absurd, And Pater premature. The jest is, as your reviewer says, borrowed from the sixth Tatter. It is further note- worthy that this Tatlet- was written by Steele, who got the said jest in conversation from Addison. And it was this in The Tatler that disclosed to Addison the fact that Steele was writing these papers, as Johnson tells us in his life of Addison. D. C. TOVEY. Although the lines of Collins and Pope are not harmonious, Tennyson, I think, was too severe in condemning sigmatism. I open Ovid's 'Metamorphoses.' and in the first line which I read (viii. 52) the letter s is repeated more frequently than in the two English verses which Tennyson condemns :— Gnossiaoi possem castris insistere regis. In the Greek Testament (Mark x. 52) are the words : •>) mo-ris o-ov trecrwKt erf. The following beautiful lines of Shakspeare have the sound of s all through them :— Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song; And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid's music. Much of Ovid has passed into current use. Nothing is better known than the following : Omne solum forti patria est.—' Fasti.' Fas est et ab hoste doceri. ' Metamorphoses, iv. 428. Tempus edax rerun). 'Metamorphoses,' xv. 234. Scholars, perhaps, do not care for him so much as they used to do in former ages. E. YAEDLEY. PUNCTUATION IN MSS. AND PRINTED BOOKS. (See 10'" S. ii. 301, 462; iv. 144.) As in previous cases, the superior figures refer to illustrations at the end of the article. Cotton MS. Tiber A. xiv.—Bede's ' Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.' Second half of eighth century or first half of ninth. Punctuation may be partly inserted later. Gregory, on being told name was Angles, '. No marks on i. Also "Heu pro dolor" with no mark after. In English MSS. of this century - some- times occurs. So Pal. Soc., ii. pi. 134, MS. A.D. 1405. In Pal. Soc., ii. pi. 59, Florence MS., A.D. 1466, Sallust, the ! is closely ap- proximating to a simple colon. MS. in library of Duke of Portland, Wei- beck, being an old catalogue of the library, A.D. 1400-5.—The symbol2 is used through- out as a very light punctuation, something less than a comma, e.g. * Here & is 4, whereas in some press marks (given in ' Facsimiles' by New Pal. Soc., pt. i.) it is ' of same centuries. Lower down in this MS. also occurs", which may account for the mod.7 side by side with 8. No dotted t, no exclamation marks. (My extract in the plate is not facsimile.) Pal. Soc, i. pi. 134.—Polybius, 1416. This reads9. So throughout, suggesting that Greek MSS. have also had single-dotted iota (i), though it is peculiar to this MS. Coming after centuries of double-dotting, how can this be regarded as anything but a simplifica- tion or variation of the practice ? What but ignorance of the usages of MSS. could permit any one to invent an eetiological explanation T Wycliffe's Old Testament, vellum MS., about 1420, has at Judith, cap. viii., a mark after interrogation">. But also it has the same mark at another place whore there is a statement preceding. And the orna- mented colon " serves all purposes ; also at Ps. cxxxviii. 17, and last verse of Ps. Ixxxiv.. The initial ; in ye is not of the same shape as the initial of the >)• Autograph of Thomas a Kempis, 1441.— C. Hirsche on p. 10 of the preface to his edition of the ' Imitatio Christi' (Berlin, 1891) mentions that the scheme of punctua- tion in this autograph of Thomas a Kempis (A.D. 1441) is in crescendo order12; and a longer pause still is indicated by a capita letter to the next word, sometimes with, some- times without the point. Mr. Bernays says : ''He calls the third of these flexa, and says that the Greek name is cliuis or clivis [we], and that it is a musical sign borrowed for literature." Why should Thomas a Kempis be supposed- to have borrowed a sign from musical nota- tions when he had " in every conceivable variety, as the common light punctuation, of the manuscripts used in his time ? F. W. G. FOAT, D.Lit. (To be continued.)