A brief notice of one other remarkable Ms. may be made.  It is to be found in the press Claudius, B 4, and a careful description of it is given by Westwood in his Palaeographia Sacra Pictoria, and in his Miniatures and Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS.  An early tradition declares it to be one of the volumes sent to St. Augustine by Pope Gregory.  However that may be, it is known as the Augustine Psalter, and the style of its ornamentation is of Roman origin.  This ornamentation consists of initial letters in the Celtic manner; but gold, which was hardly ever used in the Lindisfarne school, and never in Irish MSS., is here seen in profusion, and this detail betrays a foreign influence.  It belonged to the Abbey of St. Augustine at Canterbury, and may be a copy executed in that house of one of the books sent from Rome.

The Paraphrase of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, by Elfric, the grammarian, in this collection, is the finest known copy of the work.  It is ornamented with 397 drawings, illustrating the text of the early books of the Bible.  The largest miniature represents the building of the Tower of Babel.

The Psychomachia of Prudentius is very beautifully written in red and black ink.  There are 83 drawings.  A replica of this manuscript, which belonged to the monks of Malmesbury, is now at Cambridge.

Scarcely less interesting historically, than the Lindisfarne Gospels is the Book of the Benefactors of Durham Cathedral.  Their names are written in alternate lines of bold and silver, the binding being also originally of gold and silver, to which fact a Latin couplet in verse testifies.  As time went on it was carelessly kept by the monks of Durham, but entries were made up to the eve of the dissolution of the monastery.  The book has been published by the Surtees Society under its name of Liber Vitae, and edited by the Rev. Joseph Stevenson who also wrote a preface.  The meaning of Liber Vitae was that the fact of the benefactor’s name being inscribed in this book was coupled with the hope and the prayer that the same name might at last find a place in the Book of Life, in which those are enrolled, who shall be faithful unto death.* Later on it became a sort of memorandum-book, in which together with the names of benefactors, was entered a brief account of the nature of their donations.  Copies of charters were also inserted, and other matters of an historical character.

* Preface to the published volume, p. 8.

As far as folio 42, it is written in a beautiful ninth century hand, but from this point onwards, the gold and silver lines are omitted, and it is continued in varied and less elegant writing.  This manuscript remained at Durham till the dissolution, and it is not known what then became of it, nor in what manner it passed finally into the Cottonian library.  It is thus quaintly described: