ANNUAL MEETING, 1881. The Annual Meeting was held in the Dowse Library, on Friday, April 8, at 12 o'clock M.; the President, the Hon. ROBERT C. WINTHROP, in the chair. Agreeably to the usage of the Society, the business of the regular monthly meeting for April was first taken up. The record of the previous meeting was read by the Rev. Mr. Foote, Secretary pro tempore, and accepted. The Librarian reported the list of gifts to the Library for the month. He announced also that he had received from the directors of the Winnepissiogee Lake Cotton and Woollen Manufacturing Company a cast of the "Endicott Stone," the boulder in which were cut in 1652 the initials of the commissioners appointed by the General Court, and the name of Endicott as Governor, at the head-waters of the Merrimac River, to mark the northern boundary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The thanks of the Society were voted for this interesting gift.* The Corresponding Secretary reported an application from the Chicago Historical Society for publications of this Society, to replace a collection destroyed in the great Chicago fire of 1871. This request was referred to the Corresponding Secretary and the Treasurer, with full powers.† The President then communicated a gift from Mrs. Tudor, saying: We have an interesting and welcome addition to our archives to-day, for which we are indebted to Mrs. Fenno Tudor of this city, the widow of our late respected Associate Member, Frederick Tudor, Esq. It consists of nearly fifty autograph letters (forty-seven if I have counted rightly) from John Adams between the years 1774 and 1801; some of *This stone was discovered about fifty years ago, and an account of it may be found in the New Hampshire Historical Society's Collections, vol. iv. pp. 194-200. With the cast the treasurer of the manufacturing company, within the limits of whose estate the stone reposes, sent also an account of the stone, prepared by James B. Francis, Esq., of Lowell, and published in the "Morning Mail" of that city for March 8, 1881.- EDS. † A copy of each of the volumes of the Society's publications that could be spared was sent to the Chicago society. - EDS. 1 them while he was a member of the Continental Congress, some of them while he was Vice-President, and some of them while he was President of the United States. There is, also, one letter from his wife, Abigail Adams; and there is one from his son, John Quincy Adams, while he was Minister at the Hague. Besides these, there are two letters from General Henry Knox, and one letter from Washington at Mount Vernon, in 1788. I have read them all with great interest, but, as they came to me only the day before yesterday, I have not had time to examine how many of them, if any, have been already published. There are, also, several papers, in manuscript and in print, relating to public affairs at the same period of our history. These letters and papers have a peculiar interest for us, as being addressed to Judge William Tudor, one of the founders of this Society, and our first Treasurer. I propose that they all be referred to our Publishing Committee, and, in the mean time, I offer the following Resolution: — Resolved, That the thanks of the Massachusetts Historical Society be presented to Mrs. Fenno Tudor for her interesting and most acceptable gift of the letters of John Adams, Henry Knox, and George Washington, with others, to Judge William Tudor, one of the founders of the Society. The Resolution was unanimously adopted.* The President announced that a contribution had been received from the Rev. Dr. Richard S. Storrs in behalf of the *The Publishing Committee find that the most interesting of these letters, including the one from Washington, have already been printed; some in Mr. William Tudor's biographical notice of his father in the eighth volume of the second series of the Society's Collections; some in the Life and Works of John Adams. The sentiments of the other letters, those not yet printed, do not differ from those expressed by Mr. Adams in letters to other correspondents already in print; and the Committee think that no new fact has escaped their examination of these papers. It will be remembered that Mr. Tudor was a student in Mr. Adams's law office, and that the intimacy between the friends was always close. Mr. Adams expresses himself with the greatest freedom in many of these letters, and some of them are confidential. In the package we have found one letter from Thomas Jefferson, Feb. 14, 1823, written to the second William Tudor in acknowledgment of a copy of his Life of James Otis; and a subscription paper in support of the "North American Review," in Mr. Tudor's handwriting, drafted in April, 1816, and signed by President Kirkland, William Sullivan, William S. Shaw, John Lowell, R. H. Gardiner, Theodore Lyman, Jr., Benjamin Bussey, and Thomas H. Perkins. Each subscriber pledged fifty dollars, and paid twenty. The body of the paper states that the editor [Mr. Tudor] will conduct the " Review" without charge for his services.- EDS. Long Island Historical Society of £20 for the memorial window to Sir Walter Raleigh in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster. He also offered a cordial welcome to a Corresponding Member, the Hon. Charles H. Bell, the president of the New Hampshire Historical Society, who was present at the meeting, to which Mr. Bell replied in appropriate terms. Mr. HENRY W. HAYNES read the following paper on the authorship of the Society's motto, Sic vos non vobis, commonly attributed to Vergil: The source from which this phrase, adopted by our Society as its motto, was derived is the well-known anecdote about the distich complimentary to Augustus, written upon a door by an unknown hand, and falsely claimed by a wretched poetaster named Bathyllus; whereupon a third hexameter was secretly added, and the first half of four pentameters, each beginning with the words of our motto; and, as Bathyllus was unable to complete the verses, Vergil triumphantly vindicated his claim to them by writing them out in full. I will quote the Latin lines and give a paraphrase of them in English equal, perhaps, in point of worthlessness to the original : "Nocte pluit tota; redeunt spectacula mane; Divisum imperium cum Jove Cæsar habet. "All night it rains; the games return with day; This anecdote is to be found in an anonymous "Life of Vergil," prefixed to a commentary upon his works by a certain Donatus, to whom its authorship has been commonly ascribed. But Heyne pronounced the whole story to be "the silly fabrication of some grammarian or monk," in which opinion Wagner coincides; and many other critics, including Meyer, the editor of the "Anthology of Ancient Latin Epigrams," have agreed with them. Professor Nettleship, the Oxford professor of Latin, has recently published a critical study of all the "Ancient Lives of Vergil," in which he has summed up and confirmed the arguments for believing that this so-called Life by Donatus was actually the work of Suetonius. This theory was originally broached by John Gerhard Voss in 1687, and received the support of the famous critic, J. F. Gronovius; and, as it has since been advocated by Reifferscheid, Hagen, Ribbeck, and Comparetti, it is now generally accepted. Professor Nettleship says: "The Life attributed to Donatus exists, as is well known, in an interpolated and an uninterpolated form. The interpolated version, containing a mass of apocryphal matter, which must have gathered shape in the course of centuries, is now generally acknowledged to have assumed its present form before the invention of printing." So Teuffel, in his "History of Roman Literature" (§ 220, b.), speaks of the Life as "interpolated by several nonsensical fictions of the Middle Ages, which in the later manuscripts are added to the original text." And Professor Ramsay says that "in its actual shape it exhibits a worthless farrago of childish anecdotes and frivolous fables, compounded by ignorant and unskilful hands." Evidently Professor Nettleship regards this story as falling under the condemnation of such "apocryphal matter," for he has dropped it altogether from his revised text. In vain, therefore, may we search for our motto in the latest and most authoritative edition of "The Life of Vergil." The Donatus to whom the Life in question has been commonly ascribed is named in the manuscripts Tiberius Claudius, and he has been generally regarded as a different person from the famous Elius Donatus, the celebrated grammarian and rhetorician, who taught at Rome in the middle of the fourth century. Professor Nettleship, however, with greater probability, as it seems to me, doubts the existence of two persons bearing the same name, who each wrote commentaries upon Vergil. Ælius Donatus was the author of a system of Latin grammar, which has formed the groundwork of most elementary treatises upon the same subject from his time down to our own days. Its popularity is sufficiently evidenced by the numerous editions which appeared during the infancy of printing, most of them in "black-letter," without date or name of place or printer; and no work, with the exception of the Scriptures, has excited more interest among bibliographers, or given them more trouble. Even before the in vention of printing from movable types several editions seem to have been printed from blocks, fragments of which are preserved in various collections. (An exhaustive study of the bibliography of the "Ars Grammatica" of Donatus may be found in "Notes and Queries," 3d ser. vol. xii. p. 49.) In fact the word "donat," or "donet," became in early English the synonyme for "grammar," or the "elements of any art," and it is so used by Chaucer in his "Testament of Love," bk. ii. fol. 504: "But thee in all my Donet can I finde." It occurs also with the same signification in the "Vision of Piers Ploughman" (1. 2889 Wright's ed., p. 89): "Then drave I me among drapiers my Donet to lerne." Several other instances of a similar use of the word are quoted by Warton in his "History of English Poetry," sect. viii. This same Ælius Donatus was the preceptor of St. Jerome, who refers to him several times in this capacity, and in his "Commentary on Ecclesiastes" (chap. i. v. ix. p. 1019) quotes one of his sayings, which has passed into a proverb: "Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt." Although I acknowledge the eminent merits of this father of Latin grammarians, I think that his authority ought no longer to be invoked to prove Vergil's authorship of our motto; and I fear that its paternity, instead of being as respectable as has been imagined, is in fact rather dubious. The Rev. E. G. PORTER stated that the New Mexico Historical Society, recently organized under very good auspices in Santa Fé, had obtained some valuable early Spanish material relating to "New Spain." The Rev. Dr. HALE remarked that Judge Savage of Nebraska had traced Spanish explorers much further north and east than had before been supposed. Mr. George B. Chase was added to the committee on the publication of the Washington letters. The business of the Annual Meeting was then taken up. The report of the Council was presented by the chairman of the Executive Committee, Mr. Saltonstall; the Librarian's report by Dr. Samuel A. Green; that of the Cabinet-keeper by Dr. F. E. Oliver; and that of the Treasurer, with the report of the Auditing Committee attached, by Mr. Smith. These reports were severally accepted and ordered to be printed in the Proceedings. They here follow: |