btain our favors by quartos than by money. Wherefore, when
supported by the bounty of the aforesaid prince of worthy memory, we
were enabled to oppose or advance, to appoint or to discharge; crazy
quartos and tottering folios, precious however in our sight as in our
affections, flowed in most rapidly from the great and the small,
instead of new year's gifts and remunerations, and instead of presents
and jewels. Then the cabinets of the most noble monasteries were
opened, cases were unlocked, caskets were unclasped, and sleeping
volumes which had slumbered for long ages in their sepulchres were
roused up, and those that lay hid in dark places were overwhelmed with
the rays of a new light. Among these, as time served, we sat down more
voluptuously than the delicate physician could do amidst his stores of
aromatics, and where we found an object of love we found also an
assuagement."

"If," says de Bury, "we would have amassed cups of gold and silver,
excellent horses, or no mean sums of money, we could in those days have
laid up abundance of wealth for ourselves. But we regarded books, not
pounds; and valued codices more than florins, and preferred paltry
pamphlets to pampered palfreys. On tedious embassies and in perilous
times, we carried about with us that fondness for books which many
waters could not extinguish."

And what books they were in those old days! What tall folios! What
stout quartos! How magnificent were the bindings, wrought often in
silver devices, sometimes in gold, and not infrequently in silver and
gold, with splendid jewels and precious stones to add their value to
that of the precious volume which they adorned. The works of Justin,
Seneca, Martial, Terence, and Claudian were highly popular with the
bibliophiles of early times; and the writings of Ovid, Tully, Horace,
Cato, Aristotle, Sallust, Hippocrates, Macrobius, Augustine, Bede,
Gregory, Origen, etc. But for the veneration and love for books which
the monks of the mediaeval ages had, what would have been preserved to
us of the classics of the Greeks and the Romans?

The same auspicious fate that prompted those bibliomaniacal monks to
hide away manuscript treasures in the cellars of their monasteries,
inspired Poggio Bracciolini several centuries later to hunt out and
invade those sacred hiding-places, and these quests were rewarded with
finds whose value cannot be overestimated. All that we have of the
histories of Livy come to us