excited a love of
retirement, meditation, and reading.[210] I admit readily, that,
considering the long continuance of the monastic orders, and that
almost all intellectual improvement was confined within the cloister,
a very slow and partial progress was made in literature. The system of
education was a poor, stinted, and unproductive one. Nor was it till
after the enterprising activity of Poggio had succeeded in securing a
few precious remains of classical antiquity,[211] that the wretched
indolence of the monastic life began to be diverted from a constant
meditation upon "antiphoners, grailes, and psalters,"[212] towards
subjects of a more generally interesting nature. I am willing to admit
every degree of merit to the manual dexterity of the cloistered
student. I admire his snow-white vellum missals, emblazoned with gold,
and sparkling with carmine and ultramarine blue. By the help of the
microscopic glass, I peruse his diminutive penmanship, executed with
the most astonishing neatness and regularity; and often wish in my
heart that our typographers printed with ink as glossy black as that
which they sometimes used in their writing. I admire all this; and now
and then, for a guinea or two, I purchase a specimen of such
marvellous leger-de-main: but the book, when purchased, is to me a
sealed book. And yet, Philemon, I blame not the individual, but the
age; not the task, but the task-master; for surely the same exquisite
and unrivalled beauty would have been exhibited in copying an ode of
Horace, or a dictum of Quintilian. Still, however, you may say that
the intention, in all this, was pure and meritorious; for that such a
system excited insensibly a love of quiet, domestic order, and
seriousness: while those counsels and regulations which punished a
"Clerk for being a hunter," and restricted "the intercourse of
Concubines,"[213] evinced a spirit of jurisprudence which would have
done justice to any age. Let us allow, then, if you please, that a
love of book-reading, and of book-collecting, was a meritorious trait
in the monastic life; and that we are to look upon old abbies and
convents as the sacred depositories of the literature of past ages.
What can you say in defence of your times of beloved chivalry?

[Footnote 210: As early as the sixth century commenced the
custom, in some monasteries, of copying ancient books and
composing new ones. It was the usual, and even only,
employment of the f