will not be sorry to be assured that nine-tenths of them are perfectly worthless, being the quisquilia of late MSS. interpolated by Italian emendators.* It is from this class of copies, unfortunately, that the earliest printed editionst were chiefly obtained.

Lachmann enumerates seven MSS. which he considers more or less authentic; and Hertzberg has given the readings of that number in his recent edition. But there are in fact only two, or at most three, which can claim to be wholly or nearly free from conjectural interpolations. The oldest is the Naples MS., already mentioned, of the thirteenth century: but the best is generally considered to be the Codex Groninganus, (at Groningen, in Holland,) though its readings, which sometimes differ from all others, are occasionally suspicious. The third is the Hamburg MS., of which Hertzberg has given for the first time a complete and accurate collation. It is not earlier than the fifteenth century, but, though full of errors and mis-spelt names, is apparently derived from a good source, and has not been tampered with by the transcriber.‡

It is not improbable that other MSS. beside those hitherto examined may still exist, even in this country.§ But unless they should prove to be members of another family, that is, descended from a different archetypus,

*See Lachmann's Preface p. viii. + The Editio Princeps was printed in 1472, in which year, however, three separate editions seem to have appeared. I doubt if two of these have ever been properly, or indeed, at all collated; and I much regret that I have had no opportunity of doing so. Only one of them is in the Public Library at Cambridge.

The agreement of the Naples, Hamburg, and Dresden MSS. Hertz

berg considers (Quæst. p. 236) as of greater weight than the unsupported readings of the Groning. MS.

§ Barth, in his Elenchus Codicum, p. xxxvii. mentions one in the Catalogue of the MSS. in York Cathedral library. It may reasonably be expected that in the British Museum, the college libraries, or amidst the venerable dust of cathedral muniment-rooms, some critical materials are still lying dormant.

or though an independent line of transcription, (which is an extremely improbable contingency,) they would prove of no service whatever. Jacob, who has examined the question with care and critical judgment, gives his opinion in these words: 'Ita omnino sentio, nihil boni esse in codicibus Propertii, quod non aut Groninganus, cum quibus liber Regiensis [the edition of 1481] usquequaque consentit, exhibeant, aut Franciscus Puccius annotaverit; quanquam non nego hujus fidem mihi in multis suspectam esse.

*

The person mentioned in this extract, Francesco Pucci, corrected the text of Propertius by MS. alterations made in a copy of the edition of 1481,† by the aid of a valuable codex belonging to Bernardino Valla. This was done in 1502; but it is thought that the same MS. had been carelessly inspected by some of the earlier editors, especially Beroaldus (1487). Wherever Pucci professes to have restored the text from this MS., he has altered the words of the printed copy; while such as were merely conjectural readings he has recorded in the margin. Unfortunately, grave suspicion attaches to some of his verbal alterations, as having no higher authority than his marginal suggestions. Where the particular copy corrected by Pucci now is, it does not appear; but the extracts were faithfully copied for Kuinoel and Jacob,§ and had been used by many editors before them.

* Præf.

xvii.

p. This edition is frequently referred to in the notes, its text being more authentic than any other of the fifteenth century. Itwas printed at Regium Lepidi in upper Italy; which I presume is the Ρήγιον Λέπιδον of Strabo, lib. v. cap. i. (now Reggio.) A copy of this edition is said to be preserved in the library of All Souls at Oxford.

Hertzberg (Quæst. p. 243) identifies this with a Vatican MS. collated by Heinsius. He does not state whether or not it still exists; but it is clear that its production would solve all the doubts and difficulties in which the question of Pucci's fidelity is yet involved.

§ See a full account of Pucci's critical performance in Preface to

b

However, to say more on the subject of the MSS. and early editions than is necessary for bare information, would be quite out of place; nor am I in a position to speak of them in detail from my own knowledge. With regard to those more recent and critical editions from which the present commentary has been in great measure compiled, I have contented myself with consulting throughout the five enuinerated below. To have waded wearily through thousands of pages by examining all, or even most, of the editions of the last two centuries, would have been a most unprofitable expenditure of toil and pains. An editor is compelled to spare himself when his labours are merely experimental, and when he is endeavouring to create a demand which does not exist. Moreover, the editions I have used are, each in their turn, founded upon those which had preceded them; and thus the whole mass of illustrative matter, in the collection of which the classical authors have been ransacked again and again, may be said to have become common property. I am induced therefore to hope that nothing of importance has escaped me in following the shorter road. The critical revision of the text (so far as it seemed necessary after the latest labours of Hertzberg,) has been founded on the best MSS. readings, to the rejection of all conjectural emendations except those which carried with them the conviction of truth, or had at least a much greater probability of being right than a manifestly corrupt text.

vol. ii. p. xii-xviii., of Kuinoel's edition, 1805. He rightly observes, that if Pucci could call the Valla MS. antiquissimus in 1502, it could not possibly have been a transcript from the MS. said to have been found in a wine-cellar some fifty years previously. Hertzberg (Quæst. p. 240)

arrives at a somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion as to the real value of these excerpta. He says, Itaque omnis disquisitio eo abit, ut excerptis Puccianis ita tantum fidem habeamus, si disertis verbis ex antiquo codice hausta dicantur. Quæ omnium emendationum nondum decima pars est.'

(1.) Frid. Gottlieb Barth, Lipsia, 1777. (1 vol. 8vo.) A good and laboriously compiled edition, with brief and judicious, though rather superficial, explanatory notes, and a copious apparatus criticus, containing the collation of most of the early printed copies. The text is a mere reprint* from the second Gottingen edition of 1762. The editor reserves the expression of his own opinion on disputed readings for the critical notes.† A Preface and Introduction of 100 pages, and an Index and Clavis of 140 more, contain useful matter, but are too long for mere appendages.

(2.) Christian Theophilus Kuinoel, Lipsia, 1805. (2 vols. 8vo.) This edition, though perhaps the most commonly in use, is deserving of little praise. Not only is the text interpolated with many hundreds of conjectural readings, but the commentary is a mere compilation, or rather, plagiarism, from his predecessors, from whom he constantly borrows whole notes, word for word, without any acknowledgment. It has the single merit of being fully illustrative and explanatory. Kuinoel was a scholar of some taste, but not a profound one. The second volume contains the apparatus criticus, and is of little or no value from its indiscriminate collection of good, bad, and indifferent.

(3.) Car. Lachmann, Lipsia, 1816. (1 vol. 8vo.) This

*Barth, Præfat. p. xxxi.

The reader will observe how

ever, that when any reading is quoted in the following notes as Barth's, it must always be understood as the text of Barth's edition.

I reject, as exaggerated, the severe condemnation of this editor which Hertzberg has given, Quæst. p. 257. Kuinoelium tacere melius

est, ne alucinantis compilatoris fœda incuria nobis bilem, lectoribus tædium moveat. Qui adeo non solum doctrinæ expers, sed Latinæ linguæ rudis fuit, ut ne transcriptas quidem ex alienis opibus observationes ipse intelligeret.' This is not the way to speak of any one now in his grave but whose best years were devoted to the cause of literature.

is the first edition which, rejecting the many useless alterations of the text that had found a place in every one since the time of Scaliger, recalled the genuine readings on the authority of the best MSS. It is a clever, without being a satisfactory book. The editor seems scarcely to have possessed that taste and poetical judgment which perhaps can only be gained in the school of elegiac composition. Unable to emancipate himself entirely from the opinions of his predecessors about the corrupt state of the text,* he has introduced not a few corrections and transpositions of his own, which can rarely be called successful. An excellent Latin scholar, he has copiously illustrated by parallel passages the less common constructions of the author, and has made many acute and valuable philological remarks. But his great merit consists in having first investigated and as it were sorted the MSS., rejecting wholly those which bore evidences of late interpolation, and correctly pointing out such as were of the highest authority.

(4.) Frid. Jacob, Lipsia, 1827. (1 vol. 12mo.) An unpretending, but very excellent work, and the first that can be considered as founded wholly on MS. authority. The critical notes at the end of the volume are brief, but exhibit great shrewdness, judgment, and knowledge of the idioms of the author. His fault is, a tendency to follow Lachmann's ipse dixit too reverentially, combined with an error in the other extreme, reluctance to depart from MS. readings even where they are clearly untenable. His text is founded entirely on the Naples and Groningen MSS., the ed. Rheg. of 1481, and the excerpta of Pucci.

*He says, Præf. p. vi. Id efficere volui, ut-si quis forte solos codices in hoc auctore ubique sequendos censeret, nihil agere sese intelli

geret.' And he has put a wide construction on what is, in a restricted sense, undoubtedly true.