Augusteus_ there are four leaves at Rome
(_Vaticanus latinus_ 3,256) and three at Berlin; and somewhere, perhaps
in a private library in France, is or was another bit which was known to
scholars in the seventeenth century. This copy was once at the Royal
Abbey of St. Denis. Both of these are fourth-century books at latest.

_Vaticanus_ (_lat._ 3,225) is a more complete copy, illustrated with
fifty paintings in good classical style, and is also assigned to the
fourth century.

_Romanus_ (_Vat. lat._ 3,867), once at St. Denis, is a pictured copy
too, but not nearly so good in style.

_Mediceus_, written before A.D. 494, is at Florence (a single leaf of it
is bound up with _Vaticanus_). It was formerly in the abbey library of
Bobbio.

These three books are written in "rustic capitals."

A larger, but still small, group of books of "classical" date are the
palimpsests, the most famous of which are at Milan and Rome. There was a
time, early in the nineteenth century, when Angelo Mai, afterwards
Cardinal, and Prefect of the Vatican Library, was constantly launching
fresh surprises upon scholars, the results of his work in what was then
an almost untouched field. Large fragments of Cicero's _Republic_, of
lost orations of Cicero, of the works of the rhetorician Fronto, were
issued at short intervals: and all the most important of these were
recovered from palimpsests in the Ambrosian or the Vatican Library. They
had all come, too, from one place, the same Bobbio which has been
already named. Bobbio was founded by the Irishman St. Columban (d. 615).
The list of the early and valuable MSS. which can be traced to it would
take up a large share of my available space; but among the precious
things it owned was a number of quite ancient volumes, the Cicero and
Fronto and others--books sumptuously written in uncial letters in the
fourth century, which, sad to say, the Bobbio monks themselves broke up,
washed out the earlier writing, and covered the pages with texts more
immediately useful to them. Whence did they come? An answer to that
question has been offered recently which finds favour among experts.
They are the relics, it is said, of the library formed by Cassiodorus at
his monastery of Vivarium or Squillace, in South Italy. Cassiodorus is
a great figure in the history of his own time, and in his influence upon
the general course of learning. He was private secretary to Theodoric
King of the Goths; in his old age he retire