Page:The Dream of the Rood - ed. Cook - 1905.djvu/10

Rh stated that it was he who sent Adam, in company with St. Anthony of Padua, to the Vercelli school. As it is well known that Guala levied large sums upon the clergy before leaving England, there would be nothing surprising in his receiving books as well perhaps, since he was so zealous a collector, as an equivalent for certain sums of money. Altogether, the considerations here presented would seem to render it probable that the Vercelli Book reached that city through Guala's agency. For a fuller presentation of this theory, see my Cardinal Guala and the Vercelli Book, Library Bulletin No. 10 of the University of California, 1888.

The other hypothesis is that of Wülker. He was told in Vercelli that at a comparatively early period there was in that city a hospice for Anglo-Saxon pilgrims on their way to and from Rome. There may, he concludes, have been a small library of devotional books attached to the hospice, and from this our manuscript may have passed into the possession of the cathedral library (Grundriss zur Geschichte der Angelsächsischen Litteratur, p. 237 ; Codex Vercellensis, p. vi). I can only say that to me the probability of this hypothesis seems of the slenderest.

The poems of this collection were all published for the first time by Thorpe, probably from a transcript by Blume, as Appendix B to a Report on Rymer's Foedera, intended to have been made to the Commissioners on Public Records by Charles Purton Cooper, their secretary. According to Kemble, writing in 1843 (Preface to The Poetry of the Codex Vercellensis), 'It was intended as an Appendix, or rather as part of an Appendix, to another and very different composition, and was consequently compressed into the smallest possible space, without Rh