I Now turn to an examination of the grounds for arguing supernaturalism in the Phaeacian story, but for their proper appreciation it is necessary to consider an element in the narrative which unfortunately has had little attention of recent years. There is in it more than mere unseasoned description. The poet is evidently taking off these settlers in Scheria, the centre about which his humour plays being the figure of their king, Alkinoos. This is no new thing, but all, as Blass once slily remarked of a scene in the Iliad, do not perceive it. It was clear to Mure. On pp. 404 sqq. of Vol. I. of his Hist, of Gk. Lit. he describes the fun at length, deplores the misapprehension by ‘profound commentators,’ and thinks the episode ‘the most brilliant specimen of the poet's combined talent for the delineation of character and for satirical humour.’ See also Samuel Butler's The Humour of Homer. No one was better qualified than Butler for such an appreciation; the pity is that he spoiled it all by his great Homeric joke about Nausikaa's authorship. Some points are noticed by Perrin and Hayman, and Trenkel sees that the community is Gegenstand des Spottes. But generally the humour is lost on the commentators, who, intent only on the jigsawing of the Phaeacian story, mark the uerborum minutiae and are blind to the rerum pondera.

For this Fable both Ademar and the Weissenburg MS. (Wissemburgensis) fail us. We have, however, the representatives of R, which Thiele groups under his Recensio Gallicana, and one (the Codex Vindobonensis lat. 303) which he places in his Recensio Vetus; of the other two one does not contain it, and the third, the Erfordtensis at Berlin, has a wholly independent version, which Thiele most strangely regards as imported from ‘Phaedrus in prose,’ although neither in diction nor in remnants of metre has it anything to suggest such an origin. His ‘restoration’ (Einleitung, p. ccxxi) may accordingly be neglected.

In Mr. F.H. Colson's article on ‘The Analogist and Anomalist Controversy (C.Q., January, 1919, pp. 24–36) the following corrections should be made:

P. 27, note 5. Read ‘Ib, VIII. 42.’

P. 28, line 12 from foot. For συλλαβ ⋯ν read συμϕώνον.

P. 28, note 4. For παραγουσα read παρατ⋯λευτος.

In the Introduction to his Old English Glosses, published in 1900, the late Professor Napier asserted that Aldhelm glosses are to be found in the Corpus Glossary. He did not attempt any elaborate argument, but contented himself with giving a list of sixty-four instances in which the lemmata of the Corpus Glossary (none of the words, it is important to remark, being in the normal dictionary form, but all in inflexional forms differing from this) coincide entirely (i.e., including the inflexions) with words occurring in the text of the De Virginitate. Of these lemmata, twenty-three occur also in the Epinal and Erfurt Glossaries, and must therefore have existed in the common archetype of the three collections. Napier's conclusion was that the compiler of the archetype had before him one Aldhelm glossary, and that the author of the Corpus Glossary, who rearranged the material of the archetype and made extensive additions, had among his sources another and an independent glossary.