QUOD
    MINOREMEXLIBERISDUOB.AMISITSED
    MAIOREM

There may have been a copy (P{2}) intervening between P{1} and F, but doubtless neither that nor P{1} itself had lines so short as those in P; the error of F, therefore, may be most naturally ascribed to P{1}, who omitted a line of P.

130, 16 percolui. in summa (cur enim non aperiam tibi vel iudicium meum vel errorem?) primum ego] in summa—­primum (59 letters) om.  F.  As there are no homoioteleuta here at all, we surely are concerned with the omission of a line or lines.  Perhaps 59 letters would make up a line in P{1} or P{2}.  Perhaps two lines of P were dropped.

Similarly we may note two omissions in B, though not in F, which may be due originally to the error of P{1} in copying P.

68, 5 electorumque commentarios centum sexaginta mihi reliquit, opisthographos] -torumque—­opisthographos om.  B.  Allowing the abbreviation of QUE, we have 59 letters and one dot here.  The omitted words are written by the first hand of B at the foot of the page.  Of course the omission may correspond to a line of P{1} dropped by B in copying, but it is equally possible that P{1} committed the error and corrected it by the marginal supplement, F noting the correction in time to include the omitted words in his text, B copying them in the margin as he found them in P{1}.

87, 12 tacitus suffragiis impudentia inrepat. nam quoto cuique eadem honestatis] suffragiis—­honestatis om. m. 1, add. in mg. m. 2 B (54 letters, with QUE abbreviated).  This may be like the preceding, except that the correction was done not by the original scribe of B, but by a scribe in the same monastery.  The presence of homoioteleuta, we must admit, adds an element of uncertainty.

So, of the passages here brought forward, 94, 20; 123, 10 and 69, 28 are best explained by supposing that B and F descend from a manuscript that like _{Pi}_ had from 24 to 32 letters in a line, while 32, 19 and 130, 16 fit this supposition as well as they do any other.

One orthographic peculiarity is perhaps worth noting:  we saw that B did not agree with _{Pi}_ in the spellings karet and karitas.[49] We do, however, find karitate elsewhere in B (109, 8), and the curious reading Kl [.’.] facere, mg. calfacere, for calfacere (56, 12).  This is an additional bit of evidence for supposing that a copy (P{1}) intervened between P and B; P had the spelling Karitas consistently, P{1} altered it to the usual form, and B reproduced the corrections in P{1}, failing to take them all, unless, as may well be, P{1} had failed to correct all the cases.