e mere monastic trash, or at least useless in our modern
apprehension; secondly, that it depended upon the character of the
abbot, whether the scriptorium should be occupied or not. Every head of
a monastery was not a Whethamstede. Ignorance and jollity, such as we
find in Bolton Abbey, were their more usual characteristics. By the
account books of this rich monastery, about the beginning of the
fourteenth century, three books only appear to have been purchased in
forty years. One of those was the Liber Sententiarum of Peter Lombard,
which cost thirty shillings, equivalent to near forty pounds at present.
Whitaker's Hist. of Craven, p. 330.

[905] Ibid.; Villaret, t. xi. p. 117.

[906] Niccolo Niccoli, a private scholar, who contributed essentially to
the restoration of ancient learning, bequeathed a library of eight
hundred volumes to the republic of Florence. This Niccoli hardly
published any thing of his own; but earned a well-merited reputation by
copying and correcting manuscripts. Tiraboschi, t. vi. p. 114;
Shepherd's Poggio, p. 319. In the preceding century Colluccio Salutato
had procured as many as eight hundred volumes. Ibid. p. 23. Roscoe's
Lorenzo de' Medici, p. 55.

[907] Schmidt, Hist. des Allemands, t. v. p. 520.

[908] He had lent it to a needy man of letters, who pawned the book,
which was never recovered. De Sade, t. i. p. 57.

[909] Tiraboschi, p. 89.

[910] Idem, t. v. p. 83; De Sade, t. i p. 88.

[911] Tiraboschi, p. 101.

[912] Tiraboschi, t. vi. p. 104; and Shepherd's Life of Poggio, p. 106,
110; Roscoe's Lorenzo de' Medici, p. 38.

[913] Schmidt, Hist. des Allemands, t. ii. p. 374; Tiraboschi, t. iii.
p. 124, et alibi. Bede extols Theodore primate of Canterbury and Tobias
bishop of Rochester for their knowledge of Greek. Hist. Eccles. c. 9 and
24. But the former of these prelates, if not the latter, was a native of
Greece.

[914] Hist. Litteraire de la France, t. iv. p. 12

[915] Greek characters are found in a charter of 943, published in
Martenne, Thesaurus Anecdot. t. i. p. 74. The title of a treatise peri
phuseon merismou, and the word theotokos, occur in William of Malmsbury,
and one or two others in Lanfranc's Constitutions. It is said that a
Greek psalter was written in an abbey at Tournay about 1105. Hist. Litt.
de la France, t. ix. p. 102. This was, I should think, a very rare
instance of a Greek manuscript, sacred or profane, copied in the western
parts of Europe before the