in the East about 1570, which was once at Augsburg. Spain--I think
principally of the Escurial Library--has suffered from depredation and
from fire, and is poorer than the prominence of its early contributions
to the cause of learning deserves.

GREEK MSS. IN ENGLAND

It is a temptation, when one turns to England, to enlarge upon the early
history of Greek scholarship in the country, but it is a temptation
which must be resisted. We had a share in preparing for the revival of
learning. Roger Bacon and Grosseteste (I say nothing of the earlier age,
of Theodore of Tarsus and Bede) were men whose work in this direction
has hardly met with full appreciation as yet; and later on we gave
Erasmus a welcome and a home. But we did not rival Italy or France in
the early scramble for Greek books. Such classical MSS. of first-class
value as we possess have been importations of the seventeenth and later
centuries. Let me, however, speak somewhat more in detail.

There was a turbulent person called George Neville, who died Archbishop
of York in 1476. It is evident, though not, I think, from anything that
he wrote, that he was interested in Greek learning, and not only
theological learning. A MS. of some orations of Demosthenes now at
Leyden contains a statement by the scribe that he wrote it for
Archbishop Neville in 1472. This is our starting-point. Now, the scribe
in question--Emmanuel of Constantinople--generally writes a hand (ugly
enough) which no one who has once seen it can fail to recognize. This
hand appears in a not inconsiderable group of books: in a Plato and an
Aristotle now at Durham, in a Suidas given by the Chapter of Durham to
Lord Oxford (Brit. Mus., MS., Harl. 3,100), in a rather famous New
Testament at Leicester, in three Psalters at Oxford and Cambridge, and
in half of another copy of Suidas at Oxford. In this second Suidas
Emmanuel's hand is associated with another, equally easy to
recognize--that of Joannes Serbopoulos. Serbopoulos lived, I know not
how long, in the abbey at Reading, and transcribed several Greek MSS.
now in Oxford and Cambridge libraries; he was still at work in the first
years of the sixteenth century. This little episode is one that
demonstrates, in a rather pleasing way, the value of the study of
handwritings and of the inscriptions written by scribes; the light it
throws on the history of scholarship is unexpected, and is worth having.

Two Biblical MSS. of high importance came to En