Where these divisions do not occur, the writing is continuous for several consecutive pages.  Thus, while each of the beatitudes, each of the parables, and each of the series of generations in the genealogies of our Lord, are marked off into separate paragraphs by the small empty spaces referred to, there is no break in the text from the twenty-fourth verse of the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew to the seventeenth verse of the twentieth chapter.  So much has space been economised, that when the writer finished one book he began another at the top of the very next column; and throughout the manuscript there are very few breaks, and only one entire column left blank.  This empty space is very significant; it occurs at the end of the eighth verse of the sixteenth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel,—­thus omitting altogether the last twelve verses with which we are familiar.  That this was done purposely is evident, for it involved a departure from the writer’s usual method of continuous writing.  The blank column testifies that he knew of the existence of this gap at the end of the Gospel, but did not know of any thoroughly trustworthy material with which to fill it up.  And acting upon this authority our Revisers have printed the passage that has been supplied as an appendix, and not as a portion of the original Gospel of St. Mark.  The only attempt at ornamentation in the Vatican manuscript is found at the end of Lamentations, Ezekiel, St. John’s Gospel, and the Acts of the Apostles, where “an arabesque column of crossed lines, with dots in the intersections at the edge,” and surmounted by the well-known monogram of Christ, so frequent in the inscriptions of the Catacombs, composed of the letter P in a cruciform shape, has been delicately and skilfully executed by the pen of the scribe.  Most of the books have also brief titles and subscriptions.

Such was the original state of the Codex, but the critic of the ninth or tenth century already referred to introduced a great many changes.  Not only did he deepen the colour of the ink; he, as Dean Burgon tells us, also accentuated the words carefully throughout, marking all the initial vowels with their proper breathings.  He also placed instead of the small initial letter of each book an illuminated capital six times the size of the original uncial, painted in bright red and blue colours which have still retained nearly all their old brilliancy.  At the top of the column, whenever a new book commenced, he also placed a broad bar painted in green, with three little red crosses above it.  Nor was this all; he exercised his critical judgment in revising the text, and marking his approval or disapproval by certain significant indications.  “What he approved of he touched up anew with ink, and added the proper accents; what he condemned he left in the faded brown caligraphy of the original and without accentuation.”  In this way the Codex may be called a kind of palimpsest, in which we have some portions of the original manuscript, and the rest overlaid with the later revision.  We must discriminate carefully between these two elements; for it is obvious that it is the oldest portion that is most interesting and suggestive.