Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/206

i 9 4 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH the audience. As his farewell shot the second delivers himself of the line : ' In hell shall they dwell at theyre last ende.' l This common damnation seems to have shocked the scribe, who had maybe a keener sense of justice than of humour. He eased his conscience at the expense of the metre by writing : c All sinnfull shall dwell in- hell at ther last ende.' So far, then, the evidence points in the first place to a common source for W and K, namely F ; next we have found P and H agreeing together against the rest, while at the same time P has apparently original readings where all the other manuscripts are corrupt, whence it follows that we must assume a common source for B, D, and F, namely /3, and also a common source for j3 and H, which we will call /. It also seems likely that D and F have a common source, S, apart from B, though of this further evidence is desirable. Lastly, since we have agreed on general grounds that P is not an ancestor of any of the other manuscripts P and ? must have a common source, which would be the the archetype, 21, of all the known texts. Since, however, there are evident corruptions common to all six manuscripts, not even 1 can be the original, which, therefore, we shall have to move back into the mists of antiquity at . Our results are so far in entire agreement with those of Deimling, from which, indeed, they only differ by the inclusion of P and D in the scheme. 1 Line 702.