brary whatever, that
they had nothing but the liturgies and church books, and no palaia
pragmata or antiquities at all. The poor man had bumped upon a
pack-saddle over villainous roads for many days for no other object, and
the library of which he was in search had vanished as the visions of a
dream. The agoumenos begged his guest to enter with the monks into the
choir, where the almost continual church service was going on, and there
he saw the double row of long-bearded holy fathers, shouting away at the
chorus of [Greek: churie eleison], [Greek: christe eleison] (pronounced
Kyre eleizon, Christe eleizon), which occurs almost every minute, in the
ritual of the Greek Church. Each of the monks was standing, to save his
bare legs from the damp of the marble floor, upon a great folio volume,
which had been removed from the conventual library and applied to
purposes of practical utility in the way which I have described. The
traveller on examining these ponderous tomes found them to be of the
greatest value; one was in uncial letters, and others were full of
illuminations of the earliest date; all these he was allowed to carry
away in exchange for some footstools or hassocks, which he presented in
their stead to the old monks; they were comfortably covered with ketche
or felt, and were in many respects more convenient to the inhabitants of
the monastery than the manuscripts had been, for many of their antique
bindings were ornamented with bosses and nail heads, which
inconvenienced the toes of the unsophisticated congregation who stood
upon them without shoes for so many hours in the day. I must add that
the lower halves of the manuscripts were imperfect, from the damp of the
floor of the church having corroded and eat away their vellum leaves,
and also that, as the story is not my own, I cannot vouch for the truth
of it, though, whether it is true or not, it elucidates the present
state of the literary attainments of the Oriental monks. Ignorance and
superstition walk hand in hand, and the monks of the Eastern churches
seem to retain in these days all the love for the marvellous which
distinguished their Western brethren in the middle ages. Miraculous
pictures abound, as well as holy springs and wells. Relics still perform
wonderful cures. I will only as an illustration to this statement
mention one of the standing objects of veneration which may be witnessed
any day in the vicinity of the castle of the Seven Towers, outsid