ed heads" to preserve the legend of a saint, and immortal truths
were converted into clumsy fictions. It happened that the most
voluminous authors were the greatest sufferers; these were preferred,
because their volume being the greatest, most profitably repaid their
destroying industry, and furnished ampler scope for future
transcription. A Livy or a Diodorus was preferred to the smaller works
of Cicero or Horace; and it is to this circumstance that Juvenal,
Persius, and Martial have come down to us entire, rather probably than
to these pious personages preferring their obscenities, as some have
accused them. At Rome, a part of a book of Livy was found, between the
lines of a parchment but half effaced, on which they had substituted a
book of the Bible; and a recent discovery of Cicero _De Republica_,
which lay concealed under some monkish writing, shows the fate of
ancient manuscripts.[13]

That the Monks had not in high veneration the _profane_ authors, appears
by a facetious anecdote. To read the classics was considered as a very
idle recreation, and some held them in great horror. To distinguish them
from other books, they invented a disgraceful sign: when a monk asked
for a pagan author, after making the general sign they used in their
manual and silent language when they wanted a book, he added a
particular one, which consisted in scratching under his ear, as a dog,
which feels an itching, scratches himself in that place with his
paw--because, said they, an unbeliever is compared to a dog! In this
manner they expressed an _itching_ for those _dogs_ Virgil or
Horace![14]

There have been ages when, for the possession of a manuscript, some
would transfer an estate, or leave in pawn for its loan hundreds of
golden crowns; and when even the sale or loan of a manuscript was
considered of such importance as to have been solemnly registered by
public acts. Absolute as was Louis XI. he could not obtain the MS. of
Rasis, an Arabian writer, from the library of the Faculty of Paris, to
have a copy made, without pledging a hundred golden crowns; and the
president of his treasury, charged with this commission, sold part of
his plate to make the deposit. For the loan of a volume of Avicenna, a
Baron offered a pledge of ten marks of silver, which was refused:
because it was not considered equal to the risk incurred of losing a
volume of Avicenna! These events occurred in 1471. One cannot but smile,
at an anterior period, when