to Charlemagne for support. The emperor also threw his protection over the temporal authority of the Pope against the princes of Italy, and increased the donation made by Pepin to the Church of Rome. In return for these services, the Pope shewed his gratitude by furnishing Charlemagne with chanters, the Gregorian chant, grammarians, mathematicians, scientific instruments, and monuments of art; and, if we may credit a chronicler of the thirteenth century, Albericus de Tribus-Fontibus, he would have conferred on him even the right to elect the Bishop of Rome, and to confirm the investiture of all the bishops in his territories. The friendship between these two exalted personages ceased only with the death of the Pope, to whose memory the Emperor composed some elegiac verses, which were engraved upon marble as an epitaph, in letters of gold. The manuscript from which the present fac-simile is taken, affords also a proof of the regard of Charlemagne for the Pope. It is a large volume, of the quarto size, containing the Psalms of David, written in letters of gold on white vellum, intermingled with leaves of purple, and ornamented with some rich capital letters. The magnificence of the volume proves its distinguished origin, as more clearly stated in the two lines represented on the left-hand side of the plate: Hadriano summo Papae Patrique beato, To the illustrious Pope, and blessed Father Adrian, I Charles the King, send my salutations and good wishes to you, my Father. These verses indicate, that the volume was written by order of Charlemagne for the Pope Adrian I. This manuscript belongs to the Imperial library at Vienna, and Lambecius supposes that the Pope presented it to some one of his ecclesiastical dignitaries; but the authors of the Nouveau Traité de Diplomatique think that the Pope would not have parted with a volume presented to him by so great a monarch, and conjecture that the death of Adrian in 795 prevented the volume from being transmitted to him*. It is certain that it was subsequently given to St. Willehad, first bishop of Bremen, in which church it was preserved for eight centuries, and from which place it passed into the Imperial library of Vienna. The scribe names himself Dagulfus. His writing is a good specimen of the renovated Roman or Caroline characters in general usage from the end of the eighth century. The left-hand side of the Plate is taken from various portions of the manuscript, and the third example is written in fine square Roman capitals of good proportions, mingled with some rustic letters; truncated, and ending in short, superfluous curved strokes, with the words not divided. On the right-hand page the initial is a large B, the open spaces of which are filled with a knotted pattern. The writing of the first line is of the same kind as those above described, and we meet with the word inmaculati, according to the ancient orthography. The body of the text is in a very regular Roman minuscule character, with the initials of the verses in ornamented uncials, and without abbreviations. The general appearance of the volume at once indicates it to be of the latter part of the eighth century. *Tom. ii. p. 100, n. 1. See also Lambecius, Comm. Bibl. Cæs., lib. ii. c. 5, p. 261, seq., ed. 1669; and Denis, Codd. Theolog. Bibl. Cæs., tom. i. col. 54, fol. 1793.-Ed. PLATE CXXIII. WRITING IN TIRONIAN CHARACTERS. VIIITH AND XTH CENTURIES. THE PSALTER AND VOCABULARY, WRITTEN IN TIRONIAN OR TACHYGRAPHIC NOTES. WE have employed the words Tironian characters to designate the species of short-hand, of which the annexed Plate exhibits two specimens. It is said to have derived its name from Marcus Tullius Tiro, a freed-man of Cicero, but probably existed before his time, since all nations who possessed a system of writing, must have found both the need of the invention of rapid writing, and have adopted certain conventional forms of abbreviation. The Egyptian manuscripts exhibit the practice in the employment of the initial letter alone for the entire word, and numberless examples occur in the monuments of Greek and Rome, in which such marks of abbreviation are known by the name of sigla. The civilized nations of antiquity, however, carried this usage still further, and required that the hand, in tracing the writing, should equal the velocity of speech. David makes direct allusion to this practice (Ps. xliv. 2), and Diogenes Laertius affirms that Xenophon, the disciple of Socrates, ordinarily made use of it. Thus, the art of stenography, or tachygraphy, as it has been termed in our times, was generally known to the ancients. The Greeks, moreover, employed cryptography, (with which the word stenography was almost synonymous,) a cypher for secret writing; brachygraphy, or abbreviated writing; and semeiography, or writing by conventional notes or signs. Tachygraphy was taught in the schools, in conjunction with ordinary writing, The Romans adopted this Greek custom, and the poet Ennius, according to Isidore of Seville, was the first who introduced it into the Latin language, having invented a series of eleven hundred stenographic characters. He was followed by Tiro, who added greatly to this first essay, and regulated its employ by stenographers. Subsequently, Persannius and Aquila, a freed-man of Mecænas, labored in the same direction; and lastly, Seneca, by assembling together all the vocabularies existing in his time, united them into one series, which he thoroughly revised, corrected, and probably augmented; the number of these signs being then 5,000 or 6,000, which was ultimately increased to more than 13,000. Plutarch informs us, that Cicero caused to be written by means of stenography, as quickly as it was uttered, the discourse which Cato pronounced against Julius Cæsar, in the matter of Cataline's conspiracy, which circumstance contributed to spread the practice at Rome. Cicero also used it in his familiar letters; the Emperor Titus was an adept in the practice; it was taught in the Roman schools; and the manuscripts of the middle ages prove that it was never entirely lost. It may be asked, however, how could a writing, invented in order to be written as quickly as speech, be useful when its characters amounted to more than 13,000? These characters must be supposed to have represented a word or an idea, in which case it would be necessary that the number of signs should be equal to the number of words in the language. Such would be the result of the opinion expressed by some learned writers, who have considered the Tironian notes merely as a collection of arbitrary signs, destitute of analogy of expression resulting from their form, and of connexion in composition. This erroneous notion was maintained until the middle of the last century, and the arguments of the authors of the Nouveau Traité de Diplomatique, (tom. iii., p. 562 to 622,) in proof of the alphabetic origin of the Tironian notes, and the constant rules by which their combination was effected, do not appear to have entirely removed it. A learned German writer, M. Kopp, has, however, more recently reinvestigated the subject*, and proved beyond a doubt, that the thousands of Tironian notes are all derived from an alphabet of twenty-two primitive signs, (J, U, and Y, being omitted,) and are abridged forms of uncial, rather than majuscule letters, regularly combining together, and presenting in each group a dominant or radical sign, and an auxiliary or final sign. Tironian notes are found both in charters and manuscripts. The specimens in the Plate are taken from two fine volumes belonging to the Bibliothèque Royale. The text of the left hand fac-simile represents Psalm XXVIII. entire, from a page of the celebrated Psalter in Tironian notes, formerly in the ancient library of St. Germain (No. 661); a manuscript of the eighth century, in perfect preservation. The second specimen, on the right hand, is copied from the Latin manuscript numbered 8799, which contains the nomenclature of the Tironian notes, written in the tenth century. * Palæographia Critica aut Tachygraphia Veterum exposita et illustrata, ab U. F. Kopp. Mannheim, 1817, 2 vols 4to.-ED. |