ly placed over the door of entrance.

Sunt hic plura sacra, sunt hic mundalia plura:
Ex his si qua placent carmina, tolle, lege.
Prata vides, plena spinis, et copia florum;
Si non vis spinas sumere, sume rosas.
Hic geminae radiant veneranda volumina legis;
Condita sunt pariter hic nova cum veteri.

Here sacred books with worldly books combine;
If poets please you, read them; they are thine.
My meads are full of thorns, but flowers are there;
If thorns displease, let roses be your share.
Here both the Laws in tomes revered behold;
Here what is new is stored, and what is old.

The authors selected are disposed of either in a single couplet, or in
several couplets, according to the writer's taste. I will quote the lines
on S. Augustine:

Mentitur qui [te] totum legisse fatetur:
An quis cuneta tua lector habere potest?
Namque voluminibus mille, Augustine, refulges,
Testantur libri, quod loquor ipse, tui.
Quamvis multorum placeat prudentia libris,
Si Augustinus adest, sufficit ipse tibi.

They lie who to have read thee through profess;
Could any reader all thy works possess?
A thousand scrolls thy ample gifts display;
Thy own books prove, Augustine, what I say.
Though other writers charm with varied lore,
Who hath Augustine need have nothing more.

The series concludes with some lines "To an Intruder (_ad
Interventorem_)," the last couplet of which is too good to be omitted:

Non patitur quenquam coram se scriba loquentem;
Non est hic quod agas, garrule, perge foras.

A writer and a talker can't agree:
Hence, idle chatterer; 'tis no place for thee.

[Illustration: Fig. 16. Great Hall of the Vatican Library, looking west.]

With these three examples I conclude the section of my work which deals
with what may be called the pagan conception of a library in the fulness
of its later development. Unfortunately, no enthusiast of those distant
times has handed down to us a complete description of his library, and we
are obliged to take a detail from one account, and a detail from another,
and so piece the picture together for ourselves. What I may call "the
pigeon-hole system," suitable for rolls only, was replaced by presses
which could contain rolls if required, and certainly did (as shewn (fig.
13) on the sarcophagus of the Villa Balestra), but which were specially
designed for _codices_. These presses were sometimes plain, sometimes
richly or