VI. THE PROVERBS OF ALFRED #Manuscript:# Jesus College, Oxford, E 29, formerly Arch. i. 29 (J). It consists of two distinct MSS. bound in one; the second begins at f. 217 r. (new foliation) and was written not long after 1276 (Anglia xxx, 222). Its contents are best described in the Owl and the Nightingale, ed. J. E. Wells, Boston, 1907, at pp. ix-xiii. Our piece is written continuously as prose, each stanza forming a paragraph, but iv and v are in one without l. 54, which is here supplied, while l. 43 is written at the end of the preceding paragraph and similarly the lines beginning viii-xvii, xix-xxiii. The scribe was evidently struggling with an original which he could not always read; see footnote to l. 105. Another MS. is B. 14. 39, Trinity College, Cambridge (T): see The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, by M. R. James, vol. i. p. 438. It gives a much longer text very badly copied by a scribe little skilled in English. A third copy in MS. Cotton Galba A. xix was destroyed in the fire at Dean’s Yard in 1731. But Wanley had printed a specimen (W), corresponding to ll. 1-21 of this edition, in his Catalogue (published in 1705), p. 231; and Richard James (1592-1638) had copied, from a transcript furnished to Thomas Allen (1542-1633), Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631), in what is now MS. James 6, Bodleian Library (RJ), p. 68, pieces corresponding to ll. 1-23; 27-49; 52, 53; 55-64; 78-85; 168, 9; 173, 4; 211-13; 204-206; 236, 7; 307, 8, and two fragments which correspond to the text in MS. T, ll. 516-32; 652, 3, but are not in MS. J. Allen’s MSS. passed into the possession of Sir Kenelm Digby, who presented them to the Bodleian in 1638. But the transcript was not among them. It is a curious mistake to think that it ever formed part of MS. Digby 4, which has been caused by Langbaine’s calling the copy of the Poema Morale in that MS., Alfredi Regis Parabolae. This is clear from MS. Rawlinson D 325, which consists of Hearne’s notes to Spelman’s Life of Alfred; it contains the note printed on p. 131 of the Life, which is immediately followed by a cancelled extract from the Poema Morale in the Digby version. Allen’s transcript has disappeared.