preferred his slight revision of the Old Latin, made at some earlier period of his life. Gradually, however, Jerome’s recension of the whole Bible gained ground, as well through the growing influence of the Church of Rome as from its own intrinsic merits: so that when in course of time it came to take the place of the older version, it also took its name of the _Vulgate_, or common translation(65). Cassiodorus indeed, in the middle of the sixth century, is said to have compared the new and old Latin (of the New, perhaps of both Testaments) in parallel columns, which thus became partially mixed in not a few codices: but Gregory the Great (590-604), while confessing that his Church used both “quia sedes Apostolica, cui auctore Deo praesideo, utrâque utitur,” (Epist. Dedic. ad Leandrum, c. 5), awarded so decided a preference to Jerome’s translation from the Hebrew, that this form of his Old Testament version, not without some mixture with his translation from the Septuagint (Walton, Polyglott, Prol. x. pp. 242-244, Wrangham), and his Psalter and New Testament as revised from the Old Latin, came at length to comprise the Vulgate Bible, the only shape in which Holy Scripture was accessible in Western Europe (except to a few scattered scholars) during the long night of the Middle Ages. But it was not a pure Vulgate text that was thus used; the old versions went on side by side with it for centuries, and even when they were thus nominally superseded, fragments of them found their way into probably all existing MSS. We have already remarked (in _c_ _g_ &c.) how the same MS. will present us with an Old Latin text in some books of the New Testament, and with a Vulgate text in others; we shall note the same phenomenon in other MSS., especially the British and Irish (see the MSS. numbered 51, 67, 78, 85, 87 below), which preserve on the whole a pure Hieronymian text, but are coloured here and there from the earlier versions. Variation was still further increased by the apparently numerous local or provincial recensions which were made, sometimes anonymously, sometimes under the editorship of famous men. Many of the Irish MSS., for instance, seem to have been corrected immediately from the Greek; but the two most notable recensions of the text came, not, as we might have expected, directly from Rome, but from Gaul; they are those of Alcuin and Theodulf in the ninth century. That of Alcuin was undertaken at the desire of Charles the Great(66), who bade him (A.D. 797) review and correct certain copies by the best Latin MSS. without reference to the original Greek. Charles’ motive was not so much critical as a wish to obtain a standard Bible for church use, and consequently of simple and intelligible Latin. Alcuin obtained bibles for this purpose from his native Northumbria, the scene at the beginning of the eighth century of an earlier recension of the text; for it was to their monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow (_see_ below, p.