sont occupés de cette question. Pour parler de la sorte, les papistes devraient nous montrer intact le registre qui contenait les épîtres de Jean VIII, pour voir si une telle lettre s’y trouve, et dans quel état. Mais la dernière partie des lettres de Jean VIII est disparue, et voici ce que dit Philippe Jaffe de celles qui nous sont parvenues, dans l’avis qu’il a mis en tête de
succeeded to office 995 years ago. His eminence seems not to have been aware that the copy published of it in Greek by Beveridge was taken from a collection inscribed with the name of a patriarch of Constantinople, dear to the Latins, propably the very volume brought by the Greeks with them to Florence, and since become the property of the Bodleian library. Still, what is the only corollary to be drawn from the argument which he seeks to build on his researches in the Vatican ? That, to the best of his belief, the regests or authentic collections in manuscript of all the letters ever written by every pope in his official capacity, for the last 1,000 years at least, are preserved entire in the Vatican. We may judge of their intrinsic importance by those which came by some lucky accident into the hands of Baluzius, and were published by him as far as they went, of the great pope of the middle ages, Innocent III. We may judge of their proportions by the tantalising references in the annals of Raynaldus to books three, four, or five, as the case may be, of the epistles of some pope, to which nobody else can have access, and from which he treats us too often by far to some miserably brief or clumsily selected extract. Even the cardinal was not so fortunate as to have lived long enough to print all he would, and in two or three cases he has certainly, for some reason or other, abstained from printing all he could. It is hard to know that there are materials for so much increased information within reach, yet not to have access to them : it seems doubly hard to believe that any of the fugitive manuscripts that flocked to the Vatican in such shoals from Constantinople, when their old home was destroyed, and had such magnificent quarters assigned them for their new domicile, were intended to be kept close prisoners. »
