pieces numbered 35-42 which are, as has been said, of secondary importance; of the Irish glosses in F on No. 5; and of some glosses or marginalia from the same manuscript on the hymns 19, 21, 22, which have not hitherto been deciphered, or at least printed, by previous editors. In addition we have printed, wherever we could read them, notes, consisting for the most part of fragments of patristic Latin, which are written on the upper margins of T.

Our main object has been to present the complete contents of T and F to the reader, in a form in which their variations can be readily apprehended; and in our apparatus criticus we have given the readings of such other manuscripts with Celtic affinities as we know to contain any of our hymns and seem worthy of collation. A description of these manuscripts, twenty-eight in number, exclusive of T and F, will be given in the following section.

We have, then, printed the text of T as a standard wherever it was available; where it is defective, either from mutilation, or because, as in the case of Nos. 41-47, it did not originally contain the pieces in question, the text of F has been printed. In all cases where this has been done the fact is signified, as a glance at the arrangement of the pages will show. In orthographical details we have followed the usage of the manuscripts exactly, and for the most part as regards capital letters, with the exception that we have uniformly capitalized proper names. Letters and words included in square brackets [] do not exist in the MSS., but have been supplied by the editors; round brackets () have been used to mark off letters and words, which though now illegible in the MSS., we have reason to believe were originally there. We have used italics to mark the expansion of contractions in the Irish texts; in the Latin pieces it did not seem necessary to disfigure our pages with this artifice, as doubt as to the meaning of a contraction can only arise, in manuscripts like these, very rarely if at all. The compendia scribendi adopted by the scribes are those usually found

in Irish MSS. We have tried to mark by differences of type the more conspicuous differences in the various styles of writing that occur in T.

The chief defect in Dr. Todd's presentation of the text arose from the lack of MS. evidence which he had before him, and he had recourse sometimes in consequence to the testimony of printed editions. This defect we have tried to remedy, and in some cases have been able to add considerably to the MS. testimony heretofore printed; in other cases we have failed to find our hymns existing elsewhere (e.g., Nos. 25, 26, 29, 37-39, 41, 45); but we have been careful to base our apparatus criticus in all cases on MS. evidence alone.

Of the hymns, prefaces, and glosses in the Irish language, translations are given in our second volume. These are entirely the work of Dr. Atkinson, who is also solely responsible for the collation of the Irish pieces with the manuscripts, and for the Glossaries of the Irish words in the principal hymns (Nos. 5, 19-24, 29), and in the Amra (No. 33), which are printed at the end of this volume. In these glossaries no account is taken of the vocabulary of the Prefaces or the Glosses, as these represent a later stage in the language; and for a like reason, the later Irish pieces (Nos. 36–42) are not drawn upon. For the collation of the Latin texts of T, F and B, Dr. Atkinson and I are jointly responsible; the materials for the rest of the apparatus criticus I have myself collected. The introduction to Vol. II, which deals with the metrical systems of the Liber Hymnorum, is the work of Dr. Atkinson; I have written all the notes, with the exception of a few on Irish linguistic, which will be readily recognised.

§ 4. DESCRIPTION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS.

T. The manuscript classed E. 4. 2, in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin (saec. xi). It consists now of 34 vellum folios. about 10 inches long by 7 broad, with three supplementary

scraps of vellum bound in at the end, which we have numbered as fragmenta i, ii, iii. The first page, which probably contained the Preface to S. Sechnall's hymn Audite omnes, in honour of S. Patrick, is missing, as is also one folio between ff. 12 and 13, and two folios between ff. 24 and 25 (see p. 149). The folios towards the end have been displaced by the binder, and their order should be: 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 26, 27, 33, 28. We have printed the text in this order. It is not possible now to determine in what fashion the leaves were gathered and bound together when the MS. was in its original form. It contains the pieces 1–40 (incl.) in order as given in the Table of Contents. The initial letters of the hymns are beautiful specimens of the Irish art of illumination in the middle ages; and the writing as far as fol. 31 is splendidly executed (see Plate I). After this point it degenerates, and is apparently of considerably later date than that of the main body of the manuscript; it is probable indeed that these later hymns, none of which occurs in the Franciscan copy, may not in strictness belong to the Liber Hymnorum itself, but are supplementary pieces added by a later scribe. There are various styles of writing in the manuscript. The Latin hymns as far as No. 25 are in a fine square semi-uncial which we have represented by pica type; the Irish hymns and the prayers are in an angular character, and we have printed them in small pica, as also the Prefaces which are in a smaller angular hand. As far as No. 23 there are interlinear and marginal glosses to all the hymns in Latin and Irish in very minute writing which, we have given in brevier type.1 In addition to these there are notes in the upper margins, much defaced and very hard to read, which we have attempted to reproduce at the end of each hymn; they are chiefly extracts from Augustine, Isidore, Gregory and Hraban of S. Maur, and do not seem as a rule to have any special bearing upon the text. But it has been necessary for the plan of this edition to

1 The references at the foot of the pages in nonpareil type have been added by me.

print them so far as they are legible, in order that the reader may have the entire contents of the MS. before him. These, together with the glosses, may be somewhat later than the text of the hymns; but it does not seem to us that there is any clear evidence for this, palæographical or other. The MS. is not easy to date with precision, but it is probably of the eleventh century and perhaps belongs to its earlier years.

Of its history we know practically nothing. It has been in the Library of Trinity College since the middle of the seventeenth century; and it is possible that it came to us through Archbishop Ussher, although it is not kept with the bulk of his manuscripts. A few notes from it are found in the seventeenth century paper MS. F. 4. 30, in the same Library, but they throw no light on its provenance.

It is probable that Ware had seen it, though it is possible that his words refer to another copy of the Liber Hymnorum which we have failed to trace. In his Opuscula S. Patricii (p. 144) he says: "Neque hic prætermittendum extare etiamnum Hymnum S. Patricio attributum, in antiquo tum Latinorum tum Hibernicorum Hymnorum codice, literis Hibernicis descripto, ad conuentum fratrum minorum de obseruantia Donegalliæ olim pertinente, qui ita definit; Domini est salus. domini est salus, salus tua Domine sit semper nobiscum, Reliqua pars eiusdem lingua Hibernica conscripta est, a cuius peritia me longe abesse profiteor; ideoque Hymni illius editio ab alio quopiam est expectanda."

The piece here referred to the Lorica S. Patricii (our No. 24) is not in F; and F seems to be complete and to have survived without mutilation. It is in T, but there is no other evidence for connecting T with the Donegal Franciscans; and further the Latin versicles at the end do not agree exactly with the text of them in T. They agree much better with the readings of (see p. 135); but then ℗ = Rawl. B. 512 could not possibly be described as a Book of Latin and Irish Hymns.

If Ware's evidence is to be securely relied on, his words would suggest the existence of another copy of the Liber Hymnorum, possibly at Brussels, where some of the Louvain manuscripts ultimately found a home. But we have not been able to trace the existence of such a book; and perhaps the true inference to draw from Ware's statement is that he had seen T (though where, we know not) and was speaking from memory, or from imperfect notes, of the versicles at the end of the Lorica. The reference to the Donegal Franciscans may be due to some further confusion with F. It is hardly likely that the Donegal Convent had two copies of the Liber Hymnorum.

A beautiful modern copy on paper of the entire volume (T)` was acquired by Trinity College in 1892, at the dispersion of the library of Bishop Reeves, the eminent Celtic scholar and antiquary. At the end of this there is a colophon: "Ar na críocnúccad du Patraic .h. Caoim. mdcccxlii," which seems to indicate that it was the work, not of Bishop Reeves himself as we were inclined to believe on a hasty examination, but of one Patrick O'Keeffe, who was well-known in Dublin half a century since as an Irish scribe. It is carefully executed, and aims at reproducing its exemplar paginatim et literatim; but it does not add in any way to our knowledge of the book.

F. This valuable MS., now preserved in the Library of the Franciscan Convent at Dublin (saec. xi), is the only other copy of the Irish Liber Hymnorum known to us. It consists of 23 folios, and it contains in the following order the pieces which are numbered 41, 42, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 43, 44, 10 45, 5, 6, 11, 46, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 47, in our Table of Contents. It thus omits Nos. 24-40 (incl.) which are found in T, and contains Nos. 41-47 (incl.) which are absent from that MS.; the remaining hymns being common to both MSS., though not always occurring in the same order. Of the pieces peculiar to F, only 41 and 42 are in Irish, the rest being Latin. It is not a copy of T, as will be seen from the collation,