204 ST. MARK’S REST

lay open on the waves, miraculous, like St. Cuthbert’s book,¹-a golden legend on countless leaves: now, like Baruch’s roll,² it is being cut with the penknife, leaf by leaf, and consumed in the fire of the most brutish of the fiends.³ What fragments of it may yet be saved in blackened scroll, like those withered Cottonian relics in our National library,⁴ of which so much has been redeemed by love and skill, this book will help you, partly, to read. Partly,-for I know only myself in part; but what I tell you, so far as it reaches, will be truer than you have heard hitherto, because founded on this absolutely faithful witness, despised by other historians, if not wholly unintelligible to them.

I am obliged to write shortly, being too old now to spare time for anything more than needful work; and I write at speed, careless of afterwards remediable mistakes, of which adverse readers may gather as many as they choose: that to which such readers are adverse will be found truth that can abide any quantity of adversity.

As I can get my chapters done, they shall be published in this form, for such service as they can presently do. The entire book will consist of not more than twelve such parts, with two of appendices, forming two volumes: is I can get what I have to say into six parts, with one appendix, all the better.⁵

Two separate little guides, one to the Academy, the

¹ [The Book of the Gospels, written and illuminated for St. Cuthbert; now among the Cottonian MSS. in the British Museum (Nero D. iv.). It remained in the church of Lindisfarne until the monks were compelled by the Danes to flee from the island; it became the companion of their travels, and fell into the sea during their attempt to cross over into Ireland. Ultimately they found it again on the Scottish coast, safe upon the sands; and according to some, it was found, after its voyage, “much more beautiful than before, both within and without, being no way injured by the salt water, but rather polished by some heavenly hand” (see Saint Cuthbert, by J. Raine, 1828, pp. 34 n., 46-47).]

² [Jeremiah xxxvi. 5, 6, 10, 21-24.]

³ [Compare § 26 (“Latrator Anubis”), below, p. 228.]

⁴ [The Cottonian Library (now in the British Museum), when housed at Ashburnham House, Westminster, was in 1731 seriously damaged by fire, over a hundred of the 958 MSS. being injured.]

⁵ [For the actual publication of the parts, see above, Bibliographical Note, pp. 195, 196.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]