Alimansa. “Nor do I feel precisely as if I were in the frigid zone! But proceed and expatiate.”
Philemon. “The field for expatiating is unluckily very limited. The fact of the more ancient MSS. before noticed, the Pentateuch at Vienna, the fragment of the Gospels in the British Museum, with a Psalter or two in a few libraries abroad, are all the MSS. which just now occur to me as being distinguished by a purple tint, for I apprehend little more than a tint remains. Whether the white or the purple vellum be the more ancient, I cannot take upon me to determine; but it is right you should be informed that St. Jerom denounces as coxcombs, all those who, in his own time, were so violently attached to your favourite purple colour.”
Lisardo. “I have a great respect for the literary attainments of St. Jerom; and although in the absence of the old Italic version of the Greek Bible, I am willing to subscribe to the excellence of his own, or what is now called the Vulgate, yet in matters of taste, connected with the harmony of colour, you must excuse me if I choose to enter my protest against that venerable father’s decision.”
Philemon. “You appear to mistake the matter St. Jerom imagined that this appetite for purple MSS. was rather artificial and voluptuous; requiring regulation and correction—and that, in the end, men would prefer the former colour to the intrinsic worth of their vellum treasures.”
We must not omit the note appended to this colloquy.
“The general idea seems to be that Purple Vellum MSS. were intended only for ‘choice blades,’ let us rather say, tasteful bibliomaniacs—in book collecting. St. Jerom, as Philemon above observes, is very biting in his sarcasm upon these ‘purple leaves covered with letters of gold and silver.’—‘For myself and my friends (adds that father), let us have lower priced books, and distinguished not so much for beauty as for accuracy.’
“Mabillon remarks that these purple treasures were for the ‘princes’ and ‘noblemen’ of the times.
“And we learn from the twelfth volume of the Specileginum of Theonas, that it is rather somewhat unseemly ‘to write upon purple vellum in letters of gold and silver, unless at the particular desire of a prince.’”
“The subject also of MSS. frequently regulated the mode of executing it. Thus we learn from the 28th Epistle of Boniface (Bishop and Martyr) to the abbess Eadburga, that this latter is entreated ‘to write the Epistles of St. Peter, the master and Apostle of Boniface, in letters of gold, for the greater reverence to be paid towards the Sacred Scriptures, when the Abbess preaches before her carnally-minded auditors.’”