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608 APPENDIX VIII consideration of the circumstances under which the letter-book came into being. The boys who wrote it were not advanced scholars, and doubtless were often in a hurry to get their irksome task finished ; of the letters which they copied, too, some at least must have been crabbed and hard to decipher. It is not surprising, therefore, that in addition to the common faults of copying a number of impossible words and unreadable sentences are found, which invite correction by an editor ; and the character of the copyists needs to be continually borne in mind in criticizing the text of letters which emanate from this source. Leclerc says in his preface that the Deventer letter-book supplied him with 322 unpublished letters. To the 304 mentioned above may be added 4 which he inserted in the Appendix, although they had been printed already by the London editor; and thus I4 remain to be accounted for, which he found in the book, but which are now lost. They covered some of the missing leaves, including ff. 225-236 and 239, and 9 of them were autographs. From the composition of the Appendix it is possible to trace them with some degree of certainty. Of the 517 letters which it contains 304 come, as we have seen, from the Deventer book; 118 were already printed in the London edition, but had been omitted by Leclere from the body of his work because their dates would not accord with his arrangement ; 1, which had escaped the London editor”, he found in the Basle folio of 1 541 (N°); and 43 more are in the Codex Rehdigeranus, 254, of the Town Library at Breslau !. Out of the remaining 51, I9 are so directly concerned with Erasmus’ Gouda friends” that they probably formed a separate collection placed in Leclere’s hands by one of the persons mentioned in his preface ; and from the prominent part oceupied by William Herman it would seem as though the collector had chosen out letters addressed or relating to Erasmus from a letter-book belonging originally to Herman. Some such collection as this was sold in April 1705 among the books of Peter Francius, late Professor of History at Amsterdam, with the description in the auction-catalogue *: ‘Cornelii Aurelii, Herasmi, Dorpii et alior. Belgar. epistolae mss, in charta.’ This manuscript, which has since unfortunately disappeared, may perhaps have been that from which the Gouda letters came to Leclere. The coincidence in time is noticeable; for it was just then that the Deventer book reached him and necessitated a reconstruction of his Appendix. If the identification is accepted, we must suppose 1 APP. 84, 192, 239, 392. ° App. 515; see p. 597. 16 In the Breslau codex, which came into the library in 1645, all these letters are originals and with one exception (App. 469) they are complete ; but for a number of them Leclerc prints only fragments. With App. 469, however, the manuscript begins at the same point as Leclere’s version. For the other letters which he prints in an incomplete form it is possible that he had before him not the originals, but a series of extracts made in a commonplace-book. 7 Epp. 5, 6, 11, 10, 17, 19, 21, 24, 25 27, 33-8, 84, 92, 142; LB. App. 394, 413-20, 436, 447-9, 454, 488-92. 18 Of the last nine letters eight are by him. È 1° Catalogus . . . librorum Petri Francii, Amsterdam, Wetstein, 1705, P- 129. I owe this information to Dr. P. C. Molhuysen.
