all the MSS. we now have. He also read a tract attributed to
Plutarch, called the _Instruction of Trajan_; it was probably not by
Plutarch, but it was an ancient work, and is now lost. Petronius Arbiter
was known to him, even that longest and most interesting piece of
Petronius called the _Supper of Trimalchio_, for which our only
authority is the late paper MS. at Paris that was found in Dalmatia in
the seventeenth century. But no medieval English scholar can be shown to
have read Tacitus, or the lost parts of Livy, or Catullus, Tibullus,
Propertius, or others of the rarer Latin authors. Next for Christian
antiquity. The Vercelli MS. gives a poetical version in Anglo-Saxon of
the Acts of St. Andrew in the land of the Anthropophagi which have
ceased to exist in Latin (so, too, AElfric knew, and rejected, a poem on
the adventures of St. Thomas in India). In one of its Homilies the same
Vercelli MS. presents us with a translation of the Apocalypse of St.
Thomas, a book of which until recently only the name was known. Two
early MSS. contain short quotations in Latin from Cosmas Indicopleustes,
a traveller of Justinian's time whose work remains only in a few
copies, and is in Greek. Another has a fragment of the lost _Book of
Jannes and Jambres_; another a chapter of the _Book of Enoch_, valuable
as one of our few indications that a Latin version of it was current.
John of Salisbury quotes a story about St. Paul which seems to come from
the ancient apocryphal Acts of that Apostle. First on the list (twelfth
century) of the library of Lincoln Minster (but lined through as if
subsequently lost) is a title _Proverbia Grecorum_. What this book was
is obscure; probably it was a translation from Greek by an Irish
scholar. It is quoted extensively by Sedulius, the Irishman, and also in
a collection of treatises by an unknown York writer (the Germans call
him the _Yorker anonymus_) of the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The
work of Irenaeus _Against Heresies_ (we only have it complete in Latin)
was always rare, but there were at least two copies of it in England,
one in the Carmelites' Library at Oxford, the other given by Archbishop
Mepham to Christchurch, Canterbury. The latter, I believe, we still have
in the Arundel collection in the British Museum. The MS. of Tertullian
which Gelenius got from England is gone, and our knowledge of the
treatise _On Baptism_ which it contained depends wholly on his printed
text.
I cannot doubt t
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