¹ Why (p. 60) should the use of belua as a trisyllable be stigmatised as a metrical license?

² This manuscript, alas! must now be written down as ‘hodie deperditus.’ I searched for it unsuccessfully just three months before the disaster of Messina. It must have been lost when the monastery of San Placido, or San Placidio, was destroyed in the troublous times before 1861. There was no trace of it to be found in Messina nor in the Archivio di Stato at Palermo, where there are a few documents from the same monastery, and it is hardly likely that it will turn up in some cottage in the neighbouring country. By a piece of infuriating ill-luck, it was the one MS. of which we have only one collation, that of Jahn mentioned above; both Beck and Buecheler depended upon this, whereas in almost every other case we have the results of their independent work by which to check the collations of the other.

³ Chapters 1–4.