0,000 denaries, as Aulus
Gellius relates in the Noctes Atticae. Now Aulus Gellius relates this
that the foolish may consider how wise men despise money in comparison
with books. And on the other hand, that we may know that folly and
pride go together, let us here relate the folly of Tarquin the Proud in
despising books, as also related by Aulus Gellius. An old woman,
utterly unknown, is said to have come to Tarquin the Proud, the seventh
king of Rome, offering to sell nine books, in which (as she declared)
sacred oracles were contained, but she asked an immense sum for them,
insomuch that the king said she was mad. In anger she flung three
books into the fire, and still asked the same sum for the rest. When
the king refused it, again she flung three others into the fire and
still asked the same price for the three that were left. At last,
astonished beyond measure, Tarquin was glad to pay for three books the
same price for which he might have bought nine. The old woman
straightway disappeared, and was never seen before or after. These
were the Sibylline books, which the Romans consulted as a divine oracle
by some one of the Quindecemvirs, and this is believed to have been the
origin of the Quindecemvirate. What did this Sibyl teach the proud
king by this bold deed, except that the vessels of wisdom, holy books,
exceed all human estimation; and, as Gregory says of the kingdom of
Heaven: They are worth all that thou hast?

CHAPTER IV

THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST THE CLERGY ALREADY PROMOTED

A generation of vipers destroying their own parent and base offspring
of the ungrateful cuckoo, who when he has grown strong slays his nurse,
the giver of his strength, are degenerate clerks with regard to books.
Bring it again to mind and consider faithfully what ye receive through
books, and ye will find that books are as it were the creators of your
distinction, without which other favourers would have been wanting.

In sooth, while still untrained and helpless ye crept up to us, ye
spake as children, ye thought as children, ye cried as children and
begged to be made partakers of our milk. But we being straightway
moved by your tears gave you the breast of grammar to suck, which ye
plied continually with teeth and tongue, until ye lost your native
barbarousness and learned to speak with our tongues the mighty things
of God. And next we clad you with the goodly garments of philosophy,
rhetoric and dialectic, of