Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/206

 i 9 4 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH the audience. As his farewell shot the second delivers himself of the line : ' In hell shall they dwell at theyre last ende.' l This common damnation seems to have shocked the scribe, who had maybe a keener sense of justice than of humour. He eased his conscience at the expense of the metre by writing : c All sinnfull shall dwell in- hell at ther last ende.' So far, then, the evidence points in the first place to a common source for W and K, namely F ; next we have found P and H agreeing together against the rest, while at the same time P has apparently original readings where all the other manuscripts are corrupt, whence it follows that we must assume a common source for B, D, and F, namely /3, and also a common source for j3 and H, which we will call /. It also seems likely that D and F have a common source, S, apart from B, though of this further evidence is desirable. Lastly, since we have agreed on general grounds that P is not an ancestor of any of the other manuscripts P and ? must have a common source, which would be the the archetype, 21, of all the known texts. Since, however, there are evident corruptions common to all six manuscripts, not even 1 can be the original, which, therefore, we shall have to move back into the mists of antiquity at. Our results are so far in entire agreement with those of Deimling, from which, indeed, they only differ by the inclusion of P and D in the scheme. 1 Line 702.