he covers of his books.[15] A page of
the second decade of Livy, it is said, was found by a man of letters in
the parchment of his battledore, while he was amusing himself in the
country. He hastened to the maker of the battledore--but arrived too
late! The man had finished the last page of Livy--about a week before.

Many works have undoubtedly perished in this manuscript state. By a
petition of Dr. Dee to Queen Mary, in the Cotton library, it appears
that Cicero's treatise _De Republica_ was once extant in this country.
Huet observes that Petronius was probably entire in the days of John of
Salisbury, who quotes fragments, not now to be found in the remains of
the Roman bard. Raimond Soranzo, a lawyer in the papal court, possessed
two books of Cicero "on Glory," which he presented to Petrarch, who lent
them to a poor aged man of letters, formerly his preceptor. Urged by
extreme want, the old man pawned them, and returning home died suddenly
without having revealed where he had left them. They have never been
recovered. Petrarch speaks of them with ecstasy, and tells us that he
had studied them perpetually. Two centuries afterwards, this treatise on
Glory by Cicero was mentioned in a catalogue of books bequeathed to a
monastery of nuns, but when inquired after was missing. It was supposed
that Petrus Alcyonius, physician to that household, purloined it, and
after transcribing as much of it as he could into his own writings, had
destroyed the original. Alcyonius, in his book _De Exilio_, the critics
observed, had many splendid passages which stood isolated in his work,
and were quite above his genius. The beggar, or in this case the thief,
was detected by mending his rags with patches of purple and gold.

In this age of manuscript, there is reason to believe, that when a man
of letters accidentally obtained an unknown work, he did not make the
fairest use of it, but cautiously concealed it from his contemporaries.
Leonard Aretino, a distinguished scholar at the dawn of modern
literature, having found a Greek manuscript of Procopius _De Bello
Gothico_, translated it into Latin, and published the work; but
concealing the author's name, it passed as his own, till another
manuscript of the same work being dug out of its grave, the fraud of
Aretino was apparent. Barbosa, a bishop of Ugento, in 1649, has printed
among his works a treatise, obtained by one of his domestics bringing in
a fish rolled in a leaf of written paper,