readers will not mention, owe their place in a selection to their value for purposes of edification is to insult the intelligence of anybody who has read those epigrams. But this dangerous matter is safeguarded. For those who heeded Martial's warning to read no farther in his little book, there were the indubitably safe epigrams of Prosper. This volume, therefore, compiled with a purpose about the middle of the ninth century, or copied from an earlier compilation, contains matters for edifying the soul, sharpening the intellect, delighting the fancy, and arousing the sense of humor. It exhibits principles and the illustration of them. Other manuals would of course be necessary-and the middle ages had them— for the exact study of the several arts. This collection is devoted especially to grammatica, that is, literature, but it presents that art as indissolubly connected with all the others. It is a useful chrestomathy and a compendium of liberal culture. Nor is it the only specimen of its kind. Similar collections, similar and yet interestingly diverse, may be found by the scores, possibly by the hundreds, in mediaeval manuscripts which exist today or which may still be traced in mediaeval catalogues. A most fascinating study lies open to any one who will take it up. Traube, it is hardly necessary to say, recognized its importance, and had encouraged one of his pupils to undertake it, as have Vollmer, his colleague, and Lehmann, his successor; as yet, however, no comprehensive treatment has appeared." We have been too much interested in the different texts that such a manuscript as the Vossianus contains to consider the meaning of their appearance in common. Thus editors have gone to this codex for Avitus or Martial or the Anthologia Latina, but have paid little attention to what the manuscript has outside their particular authors. We need, too, renewed investigation, already most profitably begun, of the different schools of script; for this is an indispensable clue to the monastic centres in which the florilegia were made. If the Leyden collection was copied at Fleury, was it put together there? Or at Tours? Or at 47 I am glad to announce that Miss Eva Matthews Sanford, a graduate student of Radcliffe College, will treat certain aspects of this subject in a dissertation for the doctorate and that F. M. Carey of the Harvard Graduate School will discuss in his dissertation the script of Fleury. Corbie? Perhaps some of these trails may lead us back to Ireland and help us better to understand the conditions of culture there in the period preceding the Carolingian Renaissance. Perhaps some of the collections descended from antiquity. Some certainly were not put together until the eighth or the ninth century, for they contain along with pagan and ancient Christian verse, some of the best things that the then moderns had donethe "free verse" of the day. The study that I have indicated, and only partly indicated, is brimful of suggestion. Not until it has been carried to the end shall we have a clear picture of the humanistic culture under Charlemagne or be able to follow its course in the subsequent centuries of the middle ages. 48 The Vossianus and the two other manuscripts of Martial and the Anthologia Latina that make up Lindsay's Class A (Vind. 277 and Par. 8071) offer material for an investigation like that made by Traube in a simpler case, the tradition of St. Jerome's Chronica. An ancient MS of that work, of which fragments exist today in Paris, Leyden and Rome, once belonged to Fleury. Two copies were made in the ninth century, one at Tours and one at Micy, from which Traube reconstructed certain features of the original; see his edition of the fragments, pp. iii ff. What was the character and what the provenience of the original florilegium from which the Vossianus, the Vindobonensis and the Parisi nus (Thuaneus) derive is one of the many matters awaiting investigation. 27 ADDENDUM. The earliest appearance of this curse known to me is in B. M., Egerton 2831, a book of Tours, written there, I believe, not later than c. 770, at any rate before the abbacy of Alcuin, in which (c. 800) the editors of the New Palaeographical Society (Plates 107, 108) put it. Lindsay agrees on an earlier date, even as early as 750. A book which seems to me of exactly the same period (though here Lindsay does not agree), is Laur. Med. XLV, 15, Donatus on the Aeneid. In both MSS two styles, insular and continental, are employed, and the insular hand shown in Vitelli and Paoli, Collezione Fiorentina, etc. (Tav. 37, 38) seems almost identical with that in the Egerton MS. ... The Benedictine curse appears in the Egerton MS. on f. 1 in a Merovingian hand: hic habet libru(m) s(anc)t(i) martini turonensem (sic) de coenubio ibique (1) quiescite (?) . . . . d de illo armario et qui me furauerit uel hoc folium inciserit. Note the form furaverit, for which later more elegantly furatus fuerit was substituted. The appearance of furaverit is ceteris paribus an indication of an early date. It is found, with furatus fuerit by a later hand, in the note by Berno in the Tours Virgil (Bernensis 165), which I would date not later than 820, as the name of Berno is not in the St. Gall list (see Memoirs of the Amer. Acad. in Rome, I (1917), p. 25). At the same time, as Lindsay informs me that the abbreviations T2 for tur and t' for tus occur in the MS. it could not have been much earlier than 820; a complete history of these two abbreviations is greatly needed, and so is a collection of the instances of furaverit and furatus fuerit; the latter form seems established by the middle of the ninth century. Aliquid ingenio in Reg. 1616 for aliquo ingenio, found in several of Traube's MSS., is not a mistake but an intentional variation of the phrase. FIELDING AND THE CIBBERS By CHARLES W. NICHOLS UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA The minor works of any great writer are interesting, either for themselves, or for the light which they throw on the life and genius of their author, but the four satirical plays produced by Henry Fielding at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in 1736 and 1737 have an additional value because they reflect through their satire the life of the early eighteenth century, and show what the men and women of the time were doing, what they were talking and laughing about in London when Robert Walpole was prime minister, Farinelli the reigning operatic favorite, and Colley Cibber the writer of the laureate odes. Of these four plays, the two which concern us here are Pasquin, a "Dramatick Satire on the Times," and the less known Historical Register for the Year 1736, which is a theatrical review of political, social, and literary happenings: political affairs in Europe and political corruption at home; the social foibles of the year in London, including the fad for the Italian male soprano, Farinelli, and the fad for waxworks and auctions; the acting of Theophilus Cibber, and the controversy between his wife and Kitty Clive over the part of Polly in The Beggar's Opera; the annual odes of Colley Cibber, and his adaptation of Shakespeare's King John. This play might well be called, in more modern theatrical parlance, The Follies of 1736. It is easy to prove by means of the newspapers and periodicals of the time, that Fielding, in all this satire, was exceedingly timely, and that in most cases (certainly in all theatrical and literary cases except the satire against pantomime, in which he ran counter to the public taste) he was dealing with standing jokes of the day, and was therefore sure of the response of laughter from his audiences. In no cases are these facts more certain than in the cases of Theophilus Cibber, and his father Colley, who were the targets of many satirists in Fielding's time. "I and my Father," Theophilus is made to say in the anonymous Apology for his life, "had as much laughing at as any two Persons in the Kingdom." Raillery pointed at Theophilus under the name "Pistol" was one of the well known jokes of the day, the name being given him because of his frequent and extravagant acting of that part. "Though Theophilus Cibber had some degree of merit in a variety of characters," says Davies, his contemporary (Life of Garrick, volume I, page 35), "and especially in brisk coxcombs; and more particularly in parts of extravagant humour, such as Pistol in Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth; yet he generally mixed so much of false spirit and grimace in his acting, that he often disgusted the judicious spectator." When Fielding, therefore, in the bombastic Pistol scene at the end of the second act of The Historical Register, has the Muse "rise in her Stile," as Mr. Medley, the supposed author of the play phrases it, and give the audience a "Taste of the Sublime," he is merely burlesquing Cibber's well known methods of acting. “I warrant we don't over-act him," said Medley, "half so much as he does his Parts." This little scene through which Pistol struts may have been suggested to Fielding by The Stage-Mutineers, an anonymous play produced in 1733. I have discussed this play elsewhere, and have given evidence which points to Edward Phillips as the author of it. Pistol is the hero of the play, and the manner in which the burlesque was received, as narrated in the anonymous Serio-Comic Apology for the Life of Mr. Theophilus Cibber, Comedian, shows that jokes on Pistol were popular, and that Fielding was therefore likely to be sure of an instant response from his audience when his own Pistol strutted upon the stage Pistol, in the speech which Fielding puts into his mouth, pleads with the town to side with his wife in the contention between Mrs. Clive and Mrs. Cibber for the part of Polly Peachum in The Beggar's Opera at Drury Lane. Here Fielding was making use of exceedingly timely material. Mrs. Clive had refused to give up the part to Mrs. Cibber, who desired to play it, and both appealed to the town. Toward the end of 1736 the papers were full of the controversy. Woodward wrote a farce on the subject entitled The Beggar's Pantomime, or The Contending Columbines, which was brought out January 3, 1737, at Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, and the dedication to Mrs. Clive and Mrs. Cibber speaks of their "Paper War" as making a bustle about the town, and being the public talk of the coffee-houses. When on March 21, therefore, Fielding made Theophilus grandiloquently exclaim: Behold how humbly the Great Pistol kneels, he must have delighted the town with the hiss of the mob in Wife; but a late Woman who was call'd by my Name: That Contest, I remark, furnish'd a copious Topic for Conversation, Argument, and Publication, and ended with Noise and Uproars in the Play-house." "I think the Town has honour'd 'em enough with talking of 'em for a whole Month," says Medley, in Fielding's play, "tho' faith, I believe it was owing to their having nothing else to talk of.' Of the two Cibbers, however, it is Colley who has the larger share in Fielding's satire. "Cibber, the smart, dapper little Frenchified coxcomb," says Leslie Stephen, "was just the type of all the qualities which Fielding most heartily despised.' But Fielding's satire, as I shall endeavor to show, was directed not against Cibber's personality or character, but merely against his professional talents or lack of talents, as poet and playwright, matters which the town had already had much fun over, and mention of which would be likely to bring Fielding the desired laugh from his audiences. "An Ode is a Butt," says the author of The Egoist: Or, Colley upon Cibber (1743), “that a whole Quiver of Wit is let fly at every Year!" Cibber's odes certainly were the butt of the town, and Fielding had already alluded to them in The Author's Farce. There are also allusions to them in Pasquin, but it is The Historical Register which contains the chief hit, namely an Ode to the New Year, which serves as a prologue to the play which |