Page:Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy vol XXXIII.djvu/576

 248 Proceedings of the Roi/al Irish Academy. the rules ; on the rest not even so much as that had been done. The scribe had obviously some difficulty in procuring the material for his York. The ruled pages were intended each to receive 25 lines of writing. It seems that with only three exceptions' that was the number of lines actually written on every page, ruled or unruled. The manuscript is written throughout, as I believe, by one hand. The script is good, and on the whole regular, though varying somewhat in size. The style of the writing is not such as to lend itself to rapid work, most of the letters being formed by several strokes, after each of which the pen must have been raised. This is specially manifest in one of the two forms of the letter s used by the scribe, in which there are three distinct strokes, all drawn from left to right, and not in contact with each other. Nevertheless some signs of haste, if not of speed, appear. Errors are by no means rare, and most of them are due to carelessness. I have counted nearly 250 — an average of about one in ten lines : and my list has no claim to be regarded as complete.- Among these a good many cases occur in which one or more letters of a word have been omitted.' Only a com- paratively small number of these slips has been corrected.* This fact suggests that the scribe did not systematically compare his manuscript with the exemplar after the work of copying was completed. But there are not a few errors which have been corrected either by the original scribe or by some subsequent reader of the manuscript,* and which, in view of this suggestion, deserve a careful examination. Let us consider first the large class in which the correction is effected by the erasure (or in one case expunc- tion) of one or more letters. I have noticed over seventy corrections made in this way.' In some cases it is obvious that the scribe had written a 1 Ff. 18% 28', 50'. should be referred to this class — c.r/., twice deus is written for dominus, and eight times dominus for dexis. These words are easily confused when contracted. 3 See xxxi. 5, 6 ; x.xiv. 3, 25 ; xxxvi. 37 ; xxxvii. 21 ; xxxviii. 12 ; xl. 10 (his) ; xli. 3 ; xliv. 10 ; xlv. 3 ; xlviii. 7, 16, 19 ; xlix. 21 ; liv. 24 ; Ivii. 1 ; lix. 2 ; Ix. 5 ; Ixii. 6 ; Ixvii. 26 ; Ixviii. 8, 14, 29 ; Ixix. 3 ; Isx. 1, 19 ; Ixxiii. 23 ; Ixxiv. 3 ; Ixxvi. 18, 21 ; Ixxvii. 31, 38, 39, 54 ; Ixxix. 2, 3, U ; Ixxx. 14, 16 ; I xx xi. 7 ; Ixxxvi. 4 ; Ixxxviii. 8 ; xci. 13 ; xcvii. 17 ; civ. 4, 37. 26 ; Ixxx. 16 (corr. by later hand) ; cv. 9. ° I have counted about 120. 5 See XXX. 20, 23 ; xxxii. 4 ; xxxiii. 9, 21 ; xxxiv. 21 ; xxxv. 5 ; xxxvi. 26, 38 ; xxxvii. 12 ; xxxviii. 12 ; xli. 4 ; xliv. 11 ; xlviii. 19 ; xlix. 21 ; 1. 18 ; Iv. 6 ; Ivi. 6, 7 ; Iviii. 3, 16 ; Ix. 3 ; Ixiii. 6 ; Ixiv. 8, 9 ; Ixv. 5 ; Ixvii. 7, 9, 23 ; Ixviii. 8, 10, 19, 21, 33 ; Ixx. 9, 20 ; Lxxi. 9 ; Lsxiii. 2 ; bcxv. 12 ; Ixxvii. 2, 3, 8, 14, 17, 32, 55, 59 ; Lxxviii. 11, 13 ; Ixxx. 6 ; Ixxxii. 19 ; Ixxxiii. 6 ; Ixxxvii. 12 {bis), 16 ; Ixxxviii. 11, 36 ; xc. 10 ; xci. 12 ; xcv. 6, 7, 10 ; xcvi. 5 ; xcLx. 3 ; c. 5 ; cii. 13, 21 ; ciii. 13, 16 ; civ. 35, 40 ; cv. 6.
 * It is probable that many readings which have the appearance of genuine variants
 * xxxviii. 12 ; xl. 10 ; xlv. 3 ; xlviii. 7 (partial correction) ; xlix. 21 ; Ivii. 1 ; Lxxvii.