book under nine hundred years old, that shall so exactly agree word for word, and, what at first amazed me, order for order, that no two tallies, nor two indentures, can agree better(200).” In 1720, some progress having been made in the task of collation, chiefly at Paris, by John Walker, Fellow of Trinity, who was designated by Bentley “overseer and corrector of the press,” but proved in fact a great deal more; Bentley published his Proposals for Printing(201), a work which “he consecrates, as a κειμήλιων, a κτῆμα ἐσαεί, a _charter_, a _magna charta_, to the whole Christian Church; to last when all the ancient MSS. here quoted may be lost and extinguished.” Alas for the emptiness of human anticipations! Of this noble design, projected by one of the most diligent, by one of the most highly gifted men our dear mother Cambridge ever nourished, nothing now remains but a few scattered notices in treatises on Textual Criticism, and large undigested stores of various readings and random observations, accumulated in his College Library; papers which no real student ever glanced through, but with a heart saddened—almost sickened—at the sight of so much labour lost(202). The specimen chapter (Apocalypse xxii) which accompanied his Proposals shows clearly how little had yet been done towards arranging the materials that had been collected; codices are cited there, and in many of his loose notes, not separately and by name, as in Mill’s volume, but mostly as “Anglicus unus, tres codd. veterrimi, Gall. quatuor, Germ. unus,” &c., in the rough fashion of the Oxford N. T. of 1675(203).