That the rich accession to our sacred literature, thus made amidst many obstacles, should be turned speedily to public advantage, two conditions had to be fulfilled. |William Cureton and his labours in Oriental Literature.| Skilful labour had first to be employed in the arrangement of a mass of fragments. Scholars competently prepared, by previous studies in Oriental literature and more especially in Syriac, must then get to work on their transcription, their gloss, and their publication. It could scarcely have been expected, beforehand, that any one man would be able to undertake both tasks, and to keep them, for some years to come, well abreast. The fact, however, proved to be so. The right man was already in the right place for the work that was to be done.
The late William Cureton had entered the service of the Trustees of the British Museum in 1837, at the age of twenty-nine, when he had been already for about eight years in holy orders. He was a native of Westbury, in Shropshire. His education, begun at Newport School, had been matured at Christ Church, Oxford. He had been just about to enter himself at Christ Church in the ordinary way, when his father died, suddenly, leaving the family fortunes under considerable embarrassment. Cureton, and a brother of his, showed the metal they were both made of, by instantly changing their youthful plans. That the whole of the diminished patrimony might be at their mother’s sole disposal, William Cureton went to Oxford as a servitor. His brother, instead of waiting for his expected commission in the Army, enlisted as a private dragoon. And certainly, in the issue, neither of these young men lost any ‘dignity’—in any sense of that word—on account of the step so unselfishly taken at their start in life.
William Cureton began his literary labours as a Coadjutor-Under-Librarian in old Bodley. Dr. Gaisford introduced him to Dr. Bandinel, in 1834, with the words:—‘I bring you a good son. He will make a good librarian.’ It was at Oxford that he laid the substantial foundation of his Oriental studies. After three years, he followed the fashion already set him by some of the best and ablest officers the Bodleian has ever had—Ellis, Baber, and H. O. Coxe, for example—by transferring, for a time, his services from the great Library of Oxford to that of London. |Cureton’s entrance into the British Museum.| His first (or nearly his first) Museum task was to set to work on the cataloguing of the Arabic and Persian MSS. In 1842, he began his earliest Oriental publication (undertaken for the ‘Oriental Text Society,’ to be mentioned presently), namely, Al Sharastani’s ‘Book of Religious and of Philosophical Sects.’
At the British Museum, he became quite as notable for the amiability of his character, and the genial frankness of his manners, as for his scholarly attainments and his power of authorship. I have a vivid recollection of my own introduction to him, in the February of 1839, and of the impression made on me by his kindly and cordial greeting. When I noted that pleasant face, which beamed with good nature as well as with intellect, I instantly appreciated the force of the words used by my introducer: ‘Let me make you known,’ said he, ‘to my father-confessor.’ I thought the choice to be obviously a felicitous one. Not less vivid is my memory of the delight Mr. Cureton manifested on receiving, within the Museum vaults, the first importation from the Nitrian Desert. The sight of such a mass of torn, disorderly, and dirty fragments, would have appalled many men not commonly afraid of labour, but to William Cureton the scholarly ardour of discovery made the task, from the first, a pleasure. When successive fresh arrivals gave new hope that many gaps in the manuscripts of earliest importation would, in course of time, be filled up, the laborious pleasure ripened into joy.
The collection, obtained by the long succession of labours already narrated, reached the British Museum on the first of May, 1843. When the cases were opened, very few indeed of the MSS. were perfect. |Fragmentary condition of the Syriac MSS. imported in 1843.| Nearly two hundred volumes had been torn into separate leaves, and then mixed up together, by blind chance and human stupidity. It was a perplexing sight. But the eyes that looked on it belonged to a seeing head. Even into a little chaos like this, almost hopeless as at the first glance it seemed, the learning, assiduity, and patience of Mr. Cureton gradually brought order. Of necessity, the task took a long time. First came the separation of the fragments of different works, and then the arrangement of the leaves into volumes, with no aid to pagination or catchwords. With translations of extant Greek works, the collection of their originals gave, of course, great help. But in a multitude of cases every leaf had to be read and closely studied.
Within about eighteen months of the reception of the MSS., Mr. Cureton had ascertained the number of volumes—reckoning books made up of fragments, as well as complete works—to amount to three hundred and seventeen, of which two hundred and forty-six were on vellum, and seventy on paper; all in Syriac or Aramaic, except one volume of Coptic fragments. With the forty-nine volumes previously acquired, an addition was thus made to the MS. Department of the National Library of three hundred and sixty-six volumes. Many of these volumes contain two, three, or four distinct works, of different dates, bound together, so that probably, in the whole, there were of manuscripts and parts of manuscripts, upwards of one thousand, written in all parts of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, and at periods which range from the year 411 to the year 1292. Of the specific character and contents of some of the choicest of these MSS., mention will be made hereafter.
Dr. Cureton’s publications in Syriac, and in Arabic Literature.
For several years, the labour on the Syriac fragments did but alternate with that on the larger body of the Arabic MSS., a classed catalogue of which Mr. Cureton published in 1846,—only a month or two after he had contributed to the Quarterly Review a deeply interesting and masterly article on the Syriac discoveries. This paper was quickly followed by his first edition of the Three Epistles of St. Ignatius (I, to Polycarp; II, to the Ephesians; III, to the Romans). In an able preface, he contended that, of these genuine Epistles, all previous recensions were, to a considerable extent, interpolated, garbled, and spurious; and also that the other Ignatian Epistles, so-called, are entirely supposititious. In the year 1870 it need hardly be said either that this publication excited much controversy, or that competent opinion is still divided on some parts of the subject. But on two points there has never been any controversy whatever:—As an editor, William Cureton displayed brilliant ability; as a student of theology, he was no less distinguished by a single-minded search after truth. He was never one of those noisy controversialists of whom Walter Landor once said, so incisively,[[35]] that they were less angry with their opponents for withstanding the truth, than for doubting their own claims to be the channels and the champions of Truth. To his dying day, Cureton owned himself to be a learner—even in Syriac.
Within three years of the publication of his Ignatius, Cureton gave to the world his precious edition of the fragmentary Festal Letters of Athanasius, which Richard Burgess soon translated into English, and Lassow into German. |The foundation of the Oriental Text Society.| The Syriac version was one of its editor’s earliest discoveries amongst the spoils of the Nitrian monasteries, and it was published at the cost of a new society, of which Cureton himself was the main founder. For the old Oriental publication society[[36]] limited itself, as its name imports, to the publication of translations. The new one—the claims of which to liberal support Cureton was never weary of vindicating—was expressly founded to print Oriental texts. This new body had his strongest sympathies, but he co-operated zealously with the ‘Translation Fund’ as well as with the ‘Text Society,’
Among his other and early labours, was the publication of a Rabbinical Comment on the Book of Lamentations, and of the Arabic text of En Nasafi’s Pillar of the Creed of the Sunnites (‘Umdat Akidat ahl al Sunnat wa al Tamaat’), both of which books were printed in 1843. After 1845, Cureton’s literary labours were almost exclusively devoted to that Syriac field in which he was to be so large and so original a discoverer. The first distinctively public recognition of his services was his appointment as a Chaplain to the Queen, in 1847. Two years afterwards, he was made a Canon of Westminster and Rector of St. Margaret’s. Thenceforward, his energies were divided. The charms of Syriac discovery were not permitted to obstruct the due performance of the appropriate work of a parish priest; though it is much to be feared that they were but too often permitted to interfere, more than a little, with needful recreation and rest.