The rule of S Benet Author:Benedict Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III.] MS. SPELLINGS OF LATIN. Xxix (of the fourth chapter only) in MS. Tib. A. 3, fo. 103 (see above, p. xxiv). In the MS. Tib. A. 3 (fo. 118, above, p. xx... more »iv), our Latin text occurs in an exceedingly corrupt state. ' Scatetque mendis,' justly observes Schmidt (p. xiii). Gueranger, Schmidt, Migne, etc., have, in their editions, largely deviated from the MS. readings. Lower down in this Introduction, in §§ 7 and 8 of No. V, some remarks will be found bearing on the edition of the Latin text, to which I beg to refer the reader. It will be seen from those, what my position is with regard to hitherto prevalent modes of editing Latin texts. The principles there stated have led me to deviate as little as possible from the MS. readings, nay, I have tried to keep to them always, except in cases where their spelling would make the text absolutely unintelligible to the ordinary reader. No one will for a moment feel doubts as to the meaning of debead, prospiciad, habbatis, etc., but I deem it possible that the spelling medicetur, as lemma to Jie smeege (96. 2), might throw those off the track who did not at the moment think of the phenomenon which will be found discussed, infra, No. V, § 63. Hence, such spellings have been banished from the text, but I have been careful to mark these divergencies in the foot-notes, whereas the spelling differences whose meaning was obvious, I have put in the text itself. I have adhered to the paragraphs of the MS., as well as to its peculiar1 punctuation. The contractions have all been expanded2, and to denote them, the letters not actually found in the MS. are printed in Roman type, whereas the rest of the Latin text is in italics. In the first few pages of this Rule, some gaps occur; see the Text, p. I ff., passim. The Latin letters, so far as t...« less