The Medieval Library.

generation; and the corresponding work for preserving the books for following generations they did too, in the main, well. It is true that Boccaccio found a sad state of things at Monte Cassino, with library unlocked, vines growing in at the windows, margins cut off of the manuscripts, and books and seats covered deep with dust. It is true that Poggio found a complete copy of Quintilian buried in rubbish and dust in a sort of dungeon at St. Gall, and other incomplete works of which no other manuscripts have ever been found. But if there had been no monks of St. Gall there would have been no fragments even of these works. To the monks is due the more part of what we knew of ancient literature. They kept and copied when no one else did. When Vandals and Vikings drove them from their monasteries, they left everything else, but loaded themselves down with their books. In later days it was not the monks' neglect but the vandalism of their persecutors that destroyed. At the English reformation these iconoclasts cut out the illuminations, tore off the bindings for their gold clasps and bosses, and ised the books themselves as fuel, or, as Bale says “some to scour their candlesticks, some to rub their boots; some they sold to the grocers, and some they send over to their bookbinders, not in small number, but at times whole ships full.” Bale knew a man who bought two libraries for eleven shillings, and the books served him for wrapping-paper for ten years of more. So it was among the Saracens — the treasures gathered by the religious were, “in order to conciliate the favor of theologians and other austere men,” burned or thrown into the wells by the fanatics. So again it was done by Savonarola, and also in the nineteenth century, at the suppression of the monasteries, many books were hidden away or destroyed by the dishonest agents of the state.

Add to vandalism the many destructive fires, from that of Constantinople down to that of Strasburg in the nineteenth century, and that of Turin in the twentieth, and the only wonder is that there are existing no fewer than a million volumes from those same medieval libraries.