[Footnote 20: _Pal. des Class. Lat._ pl. CXLIII. See our plates XIII and XIV. At least as early as the thirteenth century, the manuscript was at Beauvais. The ancient press-mark _S. Petri Beluacensis_, in writing perhaps of the twelfth century, may still be discerned on the recto of the first folio. See Merrill, _C.P._ X, p. 16. If the book was written at Beauvais, as Chatelain thinks (_Journal des Savants_, 1900, p. 48), then something like what I call the mid-century style of Fleury was also cultivated, possibly a bit later, in the north. The Beauvais Horace, Leidensis lat. 28 _saec._ IX (Chatelain, pl. LXXVIII), shows a certain similarity in the script to that of _B_. If both were done at Beauvais, the Horace would seem to be the later book. It belongs, we may observe, to a group of manuscripts of which a Floriacensis (Paris lat. 7971) is a conspicuous member. To settle the case of _B_, we need a study of all the books of Beauvais. For this, a valuable preliminary survey is given by Omont in _Mém. de l’Acad. des Ins. et Belles Lettres_ XL (1914), pp. 1 ff.] [Footnote 21: _Specimina Cod. Lat. Vatic._ 1912, pl. 30. See also H.M. Bannister, _Paleografia Musicale Vaticana_ 1913, p. 30, No. 109.] [Footnote 22: See the preface to his edition, p. xi.] [Footnote 23: For the script of _F_, see plates XV and XVI. Bern. 136, _s._ XIII (Merrill, _C.P._ X, p. 18) is a copy of _F_.] In Class II the leading manuscript is another Laurentian codex (Mediceus XLVII 36), which contains Books I-IX, xxvi, 8. It was written in the ninth century, at Corvey, whence it was brought to Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is part of a volume that also once contained our only manuscript of the first part of the _Annals_ of Tacitus.[24] The other chief manuscript of this class is _V_ (Vaticanus Latinus 3864), which has Books I-IV. The script has been variously estimated. I am inclined to the opinion that the book was written somewhere near Tours, perhaps Fleury, in the earlier part of the ninth century.[25] If Ullman is right in seeing a reference to Pliny’s _Letters_ in a notice in a mediaeval catalogue of Corbie,[26] it may be that the codex is a Corbeiensis. But it is also possible that a volume of the _Letters_ at Corbie was twice copied, once at Corvey (_M_) and once in the neighborhood of Tours (_V_). At any rate, with the help of _V_, we may reach farther back than Corvey and Germany for the origin of this class. There are likewise two fragmentary texts, both of brief extent, Monacensis 14641 (olim Emmeramensis) _saec._ IX, and Leidensis Vossianus 98 _saec._ IX, the latter partly in Tironian notes. Merrill regards these as bearing “testimony to the existence of the nine-book text in the same geographical region,” namely Germany.[27] There they are to-day, in Germany and Holland, but where they were written is another affair. The Munich fragment is part of a composite volume of