[Footnote 19:  C.P. X (1915), pp. 8 ff.  A classified list of the
  manuscripts of the Letters is given by Miss Dora Johnson in C.P.
  VII (1912), pp. 66 ff.]

[Sidenote:  Classes of the manuscripts]

Manuscripts of the Letters may be divided into three classes, distinguished by the number of books that each contains.

Class I, the ten-book family, consists of B (Bellovacensis or Riccardianus), now Ashburnhamensis, R 98 in the Laurentian Library in Florence, its former home, whence it had been diverted on an interesting pilgrimage by the noted book-thief Libri.  This manuscript is attributed to the tenth century by Merrill, and by Chatelain in his description of the book.  But Chatelain labels his facsimile page “Saec. IX."[20] The latter seems the more probable date.  The free use of a flat-topped a, along with the general appearance of the script, reminds me of the style in vogue at Fleury and its environs about the middle of the ninth century.  A good specimen is accessible in a codex of St. Hilary on the Psalms (Vaticanus Reginensis 95), written at Micy between 846 and 859, of which a page is reproduced by Ehrle and Liebaert.[21] F (Florentinus), the other important representative of this class, is also in the Laurentian Library (S.  Marco 284).  The date assigned to it seems also too late.  It is apparently as early as the tenth century, and also has some of the characteristics of the script of Fleury; it is French work, at any rate.  Keil’s suggestion[22] that it may be the book mentioned as liber epistolarum Gaii Plinii in a tenth-century catalogue of the manuscripts at Lorsch may be perfectly correct; though not written at Lorsch, it might have been presented to the monastery by that time.[23] These two manuscripts agree in containing, by the first hand, only Books I-V, vi (F having all and B only a part of the sixth letter).  However, as the initial title in B is PLINI .  SECUNDI .  EPISTULARUM .  LIBRI .  DECEM, we may infer that some ancestor, if not the immediate ancestor, of B and F had all ten books.

[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