universal conclusion, and the second would be perfectly compatible with the supposition (which we shall show to be most probable), that the system was carried on, chiefly for the purposes of traffic, by the book and parchment venders. Secondly, it should be proved, or at least some evidence should be adduced to make it probable, that the monastic scribes were in the habit of destroying, for the sake of the parchment, perfect works existing in their libraries. It is not enough that they wrote de facto upon the remains of the classical authors; for it might be, that they used only those copies which, from time or the violence of barbarian hands, had been so mutilated as to be of little value, and spared all which were in a condition at all approaching to completeness. Thirdly, in order to establish the blackest of the charges, namely, the hatred of literature, it would be necessary to show that all this was done with malice prepense, or even with a knowledge of the fewness of the extant copies of classic authors. Nothing short of this will substantiate so sweeping a charge.

Now, whatever the case might have been before the examination of palimpsests, and while their contents were still a subject of speculation and of conjecture, the discoveries of Cardinal Mai, and the investigations of other literary men, far from showing that all or any of these may be demonstated, all tend to establish the very contrary.

In the first place, it appears quite certain that the parchment venders reprepared the old manuscripts as an article of commerce; their ordinary title pergamenarius is employed in this signification; and that it was done upon a large scale we may easily suppose, when we find that even the early printers sometimes used the repolished parchment instead of paper. Besides, it is abundantly evident that the copyists of the monasteries were not the only patrons of the practice. We sometimes find mere official documents (diplomata, see preface of Cicero de Repub. xxxi.) written upon the palimpsest. Very frequently the dispossesed MS. is of a sacred character, which it is not probable the monks would sacrifice; and, above all (what must be conclusive with those who represent them as enemies of classic literature), it is frequently found

* See Ducange, v. 366. The fact is admitted by the best authorities. Edinb Rev. xliii. 375.

+ As for example Nicholas Jenson, in his edition of the Clementine Constitutions, 1476. See infra, p. 404.

to have been erased in order to make room for a profane successor-for the very classics which the monks have persecuted with such implacable animosity! Not to multiply examples, Dr. Barrett's well known Gospel of St. Matthew was the ground of a palimpsest; Wetstein's readings of the Codex Ephremi were found under the works of the father from whom the MS. is called; a work of the schismatic Photius was found written over the Sacrarum Rerum Liber of Leontius; even a book of liturgies is displaced to make way for Bede's work, de Temporibus;* while, on the other hand, the version of Ulphilas is profanely erased for the comedies of Plautus, and the Medea and Edipus of Seneca ;† the odes of Horace are written over a book of pious homilies,‡ and even St. Gregory the Great himself is recklessly sacrificed to supply paper for a copy of the Eneid, and an ancient commentary on its beauties.§

This is further confirmed by the miscellaneous character of the scraps of which we frequently find the palimpsest MSS. composed. Sometimes a few stray leaves of palimpsest are met among the sheets of a large manuscript. Sometimes scraps of three or four different books, often in different languages, are joined together to fill up a volume, when the clean parchment had failed. Oftentimes the entire is made up of patches of the most unconnected kind, all incomplete in themselves, and all independent of each other; nay, occasionally the same palimpsest will form portions of two different manuscripts, and in different libraries! Thus, in the examples already quoted, the Gospel of St. Matthew was mixed up in the Barrett palimpsest, with the works of St. John Chrysostom, a portion of Isaiah, and several other less important fragments. Cardinal Mai's Ante-Justinian Code, was used, along with two other similar scraps, to supply the deficiency of parchment in a half-finished manuscript; the version of Ulphilas was found in the same palimpsest with a portion of the Bible in Greek, some straggling leaves of the works of Galen, and several other patches of less interest; while the palimpsest of Fronto was discovered, partly in the library of Milan and partly in the Vatican. May it not fairly be concluded, from facts like these, either that the dearness and rarity of parchment made the palimpsest an object of traffic with the traders, whose collections were thus of a most miscellaneous

*Vat. Col. iii. part 2, p. 248. Vat. Col. iii. part 2, p. 190.

+ Horne's Introd. ii. 95.

§ Published by Card. Mai. Milan: 1818.

character? or, at least, that the monastic copyists did not deal in that wholesale and reckless destruction of perfect MSS. which their enemies ascribe to them? But, in truth, there is not a single palimpsest which does not confirm the latter supposition. For, unhappily, all are found, when deciphered, deplorably defective; and by far the greater number in such a mutilated state,-without beginning or ending, or any evidence of integrity,-as to make it almost incredible that they had not already, when taken asunder for the purpose of rescription, been in a state of hopeless mutilation.

But, in the third place, even were the fact established, it would still be far from proving any formal hostility, or perhaps indifference, to literature. There is a wide difference between defacing a single copy of an author, and recklessly consigning his works to utter destruction. We can conceive the case of a simple monk, blotting out a few sheets, of perhaps questionable poetry, to write out a new breviary, of which he happened to stand in need; or copying for the meditations of his community, the homilies of St. Gregory, or the confessions of St. Augustine, over the works of Cicero or Livy; without ever dreaming that he was thus robbing posterity of the works of the unlucky author, to whom chance or necessity directed his hand. In those troubled times the intercourse of the learned was necessarily precarious and imperfect. It was difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain the state of the different libraries, and to determine, by comparison, the number of copies extant of any particular author. It is well known that they were believed much more numerous than, unhappily, the event proved them to be. Who could have imagined that the history of Livy, which had been in the hands of all the world, would have come down to us curtailed of its largest and most valuable part? Still more, that Tacitus, whose works were placed in all the libraries by order of his imperial descendant, with an order that ten copies should be made each year, would have owed his preservation, all mutilated as he is, to a single copy saved from the ruin of its fellows, in a monastery of Westphalia? Impressions such as these, would naturally render men indifferent to the fate of a single copy; little dreaming that, with its preservation, was wound up the destiny of that author of whom it now remained the last and only representative.

But without dwelling farther upon an assertion, which, if restrained by no better feeling, might well have been stayed by the recollection of the many undoubted services of the

monks to literature, we shall merely observe that unhappily there is no need of such theories in order to account for the losses which we must all deplore. The violent dismemberment of the Roman Empire, the fierce contests by which its breaking up was succeeded, the anarchy and revolution which for ages upturned again and again the entire system of society in Europe, and rendered the tenure of peace, even while it endured, always precarious and unnatural, make it rather a matter of surprise, that, even in the peace of the cloister, so much should have escaped the universal ruin. When we remember how few books, out of the many thousands printed in the fifteenth century, have, with all our love of literature, come down to our day; how many editions have wholly disappeared, scarcely without a trace of their existence; can we wonder that, among the comparatively small number of perishable manuscripts, very many should have been destroyed during centuries of turbulence and revolution! And even in better times, since the revival of letters, how much has been lost by the thousand chances to which all human things are exposed! How much was destroyed in the very effort to restore it to the world! Petrarch had seen in his youth the works of Varro and the second decade of Livy; he himself had a copy of Cicero's treatise De Gloria: all have been irrecoverably lost. Cardinal Mai enumerates from a MS. of no great apparent antiquity, containing the catalogue of a library at Constantinople, the complete works of Dion, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander, Philemon, and Euclid. There were traces in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of several copies in different countries of Cicero De Republica; and Cardinal Pole expended two thousand pieces of gold in the attempt to recover it. Who can say what treasures perished in the partial destruction of the Pinellian library? in the shipwreck of Guarino Veronese's noble collection? in the pillage of the Vatican in 1527? nay, in the early editions of the first published books, which were sometimes printed upon reprepared parchment ?* Even at home, in England, who shall pronounce on the amount of loss sustained in the pillage of the suppressed convent libraries, "over which John Bale weeps. Those who purchased the religious houses, took the libraries as part of the booty, with which they scoured their furniture, or sold

*Peignon," Essai sur l'Histoire de Parchemin," 83-84.

the books as waste paper, or sent them abroad in ship-loads, to foreign book-binders." Alas, alas, there are too many causes to divide with the monastic scribes the guilt of this literary delinquency, that their share of blame should lie heavily upon their memory.

And on the other hand, it may fairly be doubted whether this obnoxious practice has not proved, upon the whole, rather beneficial than injurious to the interests of literature. It is not improbable that the manuscripts selected to be rewritten, being thus rendered objects of more every-day attention, were preserved with greater care from the fate to which, if spared, they were exposed in common with their fellows: the very attempted destruction, like the lava which overwhelmed Herculaneum, becoming eventually the instrument of their preservation. Luckily, in many cases, from the tenacity of the ink employed, the copyist failed completely to obliterate the original writing, and a few faint and straggling lines may still generally be observed beneath the heavier character of the modern manuscript. But the appearance of these codices rescripti is far from being uniform, owing to the different degrees of care bestowed on the preparation of the parchment. In some it would appear that hardly any pains had been taken to efface the original writing. Others were carefully washed with a sponge or wet cloth; and we have seen some which bear abundant evidence, besides, of the use of the scraping-knife (rasorium), or some other sharp instrument, which the polish of the pumice-stone has failed to remove. The form and size of the letters also varies very much, and the new lines sometimes cross, but more frequently run parallel to the old. But in general, whatever their minor varieties, the yellow and discoloured ground, the frequently invisible characters of the old writing, and the distracting prominence of the new, all combine to fatigue the eye and embarrass the task of deciphering the original. It will be remembered, too, that, at the epoch to which most palimpsests are referred, the practice of dividing words and sentences had not been introduced; and the perplexity incidental to this under every contingency, is materially increased in a text so mutilated as that of a palimpsest must necessarily be. Cardinal Mai has given some curious examples of the embarrassments thus occasioned, in the preface of his Cicero de Republicá.

* "Curiosities of Literature," p. 18.

VOL. XI.-NO. XXII.

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