he ink; he, as Dean Burgon tells
us, also accentuated the words carefully throughout, marking all the
initial vowels with their proper breathings. He also placed instead of
the small initial letter of each book an illuminated capital six times
the size of the original uncial, painted in bright red and blue
colours which have still retained nearly all their old brilliancy. At
the top of the column, whenever a new book commenced, he also placed a
broad bar painted in green, with three little red crosses above it.
Nor was this all; he exercised his critical judgment in revising the
text, and marking his approval or disapproval by certain significant
indications. "What he approved of he touched up anew with ink, and
added the proper accents; what he condemned he left in the faded brown
caligraphy of the original and without accentuation." In this way the
Codex may be called a kind of palimpsest, in which we have some
portions of the original manuscript, and the rest overlaid with the
later revision. We must discriminate carefully between these two
elements; for it is obvious that it is the oldest portion that is most
interesting and suggestive.

The Codex consists of upwards of one thousand five hundred pages, of
which two hundred and eighty-four are assigned to the New Testament.
Originally it contained the whole Bible, and also the Apocrypha and
the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians; which last was so much
esteemed by the early Christians that it was regularly read in the
churches, and bound up with the Scriptures--to which circumstance,
indeed, we are indebted for its preservation to our own time. At
present the greater part of Genesis and a part of the Psalms are
missing from the old Testament; while, in the New Testament, the
Epistle to Philemon, the three Pastoral Epistles, the latter part of
the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse, in the original
handwriting, are lost; their place having been supplied, it is said,
in the fifteenth century, from a manuscript belonging to Cardinal
Bessarion. From the evidence of its materials--arrangement and style
of writing--the very high antiquity of this Codex may be inferred. It
is generally supposed to have been written in the beginning of the
fourth century. Vercellone, who edited Cardinal Mai's version of it,
argues, from the remarkable correspondence of its text with that used
by Cyril of Alexandria in his Commentary on St. John, that it must
have been written