The Great Book-Collectors Part 1

The Great Book-Collectors.

by Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton.

CHAPTER I.

CLa.s.sICAL.

In undertaking to write these few chapters on the lives of the book-collectors, we feel that we must move between lines that seem somewhat narrow, having regard to the possible range of the subject. We shall therefore avoid as much as possible the description of particular books, and shall endeavour to deal with the book-collector or book-hunter, as distinguished from the owner of good books, from librarians and specialists, from the merchant or broker of books and the book-glutton who wants all that he sees.

Guillaume Postel and his friends found time to discuss the merits of the authors before the Flood. Our own age neglects the libraries of Shem, and casts doubts on the antiquity of the Book of Enoch. But even in writing the briefest account of the great book-collectors, we are compelled to go back to somewhat remote times, and to say at least a few words about the ancient book-stories from the far East, from Greece and Rome, from Egypt and Pontus and Asia. We have seen the brick-libraries of Nineveh and the copies for the King at Babylon, and we have heard of the rolls of Ecbatana. All the world knows how Nehemiah 'founded a library,' and how the brave Maccabaeus gathered again what had been lost by reason of the wars. Every desert in the East seems to have held a library, where the pillars of some temple lie in the sand, and where dead men 'hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around.' The Egyptian traveller sees the site of the book-room of Rameses that was called the 'Hospital for the Soul.' There was a library at the breast of the Sphinx, and another where Cairo stands, and one at Alexandria that was burned in Julius Caesar's siege, besides the later a.s.semblage in the House of Serapis which Omar was said to have sacrificed as a tribute of respect for the Koran.

Asia Minor was celebrated for her libraries. There were 'many curious books' in Ephesus, and rich stores of books at Antioch on the Orontes, and where the gray-capped students 'chattered like water-fowl' by the river at Tarsus. In Pergamus they made the fine parchment like ivory, beloved, as an enemy has said, by 'yellow bibliomaniacs whose skins take the colour of their food'; and there the wealthy race of Attalus built up the royal collection which Antony captured in war and sent as a gift to Cleopatra.

It pleased the Greeks to invent traditions about the books of Polycrates at Samos, or those of Pisistratus that were counted among the spoils of Xerxes: and the Athenians thought that the very same volumes found their way home again after the victories of Alexander the Great. Aristotle owned the first private library of which anything is actually recorded; and it is still a matter of interest to follow the fortunes of his books.

He left them as a legacy to a pupil, who bequeathed them to his librarian Neleus: and his family long preserved the collection in their home near the ruins of Troy. One portion was bought by the Ptolemies for their great Alexandrian library, and these books, we suppose, must have perished in the war with Rome. The rest remained at home till there was some fear of their being confiscated and carried to Pergamus. They were removed in haste and stowed away in a cave, where they nearly perished in the damp. When the parchments were disinterred they became the property of Apellicon, to whom the saying was first applied that he was 'rather a bibliophile than a lover of learning.' While the collection was at Athens he did much damage to the scrolls by his attempt to restore their worm-eaten paragraphs. Sulla took the city soon afterwards, and carried the books to Rome, and here more damage was done by the careless editing of Tyrannion, who made a trade of copying 'Aristotle's books' for the libraries that were rising on all sides at Rome.

The Romans learned to be book-collectors in gathering the spoils of war.

When Carthage fell, the books, as some say, were given to native chieftains, the predecessors of King Jugurtha in culture and of King Juba in natural science: others say that they were awarded as a kind of compensation to the family of the murdered Regulus. Their preservation is attested by the fact that the Carthaginian texts were cited centuries afterwards by the writers who described the most ancient voyages in the Atlantic. When the unhappy Perseus was deprived of the kingdom of Macedonia, the royal library was chosen by aemilius Paullus as the general's share of the plunder. Asinius Pollio furnished a great reading-room with the literary treasures of Dalmatia. A public library was established by Julius Caesar on the Aventine, and two were set up by Augustus within the precinct of the palace of the Caesars; and Octavia built another near the Tiber in memory of the young Marcellus. The gloomy Domitian restored the library at the Capitol, which had been struck and fired by lightning. Trajan ransacked the wealth of the world for his collection in the 'Ulpiana,' which, in accordance with a later fashion, became one of the princ.i.p.al attractions of the Thermae of Diocletian.

The splendours of the private library began in the days of Lucullus.

Enriched with the treasure of King Mithridates and all the books of Pontus, he housed his collection in such stately galleries, thronged with a mult.i.tude of philosophers and poets, that it seemed as if there were a new home for the Muses, and a fresh sanctuary for h.e.l.las. Seneca, a philosopher and a millionaire himself, inveighed against such useless pomp. He used to rejoice at the blow that fell on the arrogant magnificence of Alexandria. 'Our idle book-hunters,' he said, 'know about nothing but t.i.tles and bindings: their chests of cedar and ivory, and the book-cases that fill the bath-room, are nothing but fashionable furniture, and have nothing to do with learning.' Lucian was quite as severe on the book-hunters of the age of the Antonines. The bibliophile goes book in hand, like the statue of Bellerophon with the letter, but he only cares for the choice vellum and bosses of gold. 'I cannot conceive,'

said Lucian, 'what you expect to get out of your books; yet you are always poring over them, and binding and tying them, and rubbing them with saffron and oil of cedar, as if they could make you eloquent, when by nature you are as dumb as a fish.' He compares the industrious dunce to an a.s.s at a music-book, or to a monkey that remains a monkey still for all the gold on its jacket. 'If books,' he adds, 'have made you what you are, I am sure that you ought of all things to avoid them.'

After the building of Constantinople a home for literature was found in the eastern cities; and, as the boundaries of the empire were broken down by the Saracen advance, learning gradually retired to the colleges and basilicas of the capital, and to the Greek monasteries of stony Athos, and Patmos, and the 'green Erebinthus.' Among the Romans of the East we cannot discern many learned men, but we know that there was a mult.i.tude ready to a.s.sist in the preservation of learning. The figures of three or four true book-lovers stand out amid the crowd of _dilettanti_. St.

Pamphilus was a student at the legal University of Beyrout before he was received into the Church: he devoted himself afterwards to the school of sacred learning which he established at Caesarea in Palestine. Here he gathered together about 30,000 volumes, almost all consisting of the works of the Fathers. His personal labour was given to the works of Origen, in whose mystical doctrine he had become a proficient at Alexandria. The martyrdom of Pamphilus prevented the completion of his own elaborate commentaries. He left the library to the Church of Caesarea, under the superintendence of his friend Eusebius. St. Jerome paid a visit to the collection while he was still enrolled on the list of bibliophiles. He had bought the best books to be found at Treves and Aquileia; he had seen the wealth of Rome, and was on his way to the oriental splendour of Constantinople: it is from him that we first hear of the gold and silver inks and the Tyrian purple of the vellum. He declared that he had never seen anything to compare with the library of Pamphilus; and when he was given twenty-five volumes of Origen in the martyr's delicate writing, he vowed that he felt richer than if he had found the wealth of Croesus.

The Emperor Julian was a pupil of Eusebius, and became reader for a time in the Church at Caesarea. He was pa.s.sionately fond of books, and possessed libraries at Antioch and Constantinople, as well as in his beloved 'Lutetia' on the island in the Seine. A sentence from one of his letters was carved over the door of his library at Antioch: 'Some love horses, or hawks and hounds, but I from my boyhood have pined with a desire for books.'

It is said that another of his libraries was burned by his successor Jovian in a parody of Alexander's Feast. It is true, at any rate, that the book-butcher set fire to the books at Antioch as part of his revenge against the Apostate. One is tempted to dwell on the story of these ma.s.sacres. In many a war, as an ancient bibliophile complained, have books been dispersed abroad, 'dismembered, stabbed, and mutilated': 'they were buried in the earth or drowned in the sea, and slain by all kinds of slaughter.' 'How much of their blood the warlike Scipio shed: how many on the banishment of Boethius were scattered like sheep without a shepherd!'

Perhaps the subject should be isolated in a separate volume, where the rude Omar, and Jovian, and the despoilers of the monasteries, might be pilloried. Seneca would be indicted for his insult to Cleopatra's books: Sir Thomas Browne might be in danger for his saying, that 'he could with patience behold the urn and ashes of the Vatican, could he with a few others recover the perished leaves of Solomon.' He might escape by virtue of his saving clause, and some excuse would naturally be found for Seneca; but the rest might be treated like those Genoese criminals who were commemorated on marble tablets as 'the worst of mankind.'

For several generations after the establishment of the Eastern Empire, Constantinople was the literary capital of the world and the main repository of the arts and sciences. Mr. Middleton has lately shown us in his work upon Illuminated Ma.n.u.scripts that Persia and Egypt, as well as the Western Countries, 'contributed elements both of design and technical skill which combined to create the new school of Byzantine art.'

Constantinople, he tells us, became for several centuries the main centre for the production of ma.n.u.scripts. Outside the domain of art we find little among the Romans of the East that can in any sense be called original. They were excellent at an epitome or a lexicon, and were very successful as librarians. The treasures of antiquity, as Gibbon has said, were imparted in such extracts and abridgments 'as might amuse the curiosity without oppressing the indolence of the public.' The Patriarch Photius stands out as a literary hero among the commentators and critics of the ninth century. That famous book-collector, in a.n.a.lysing the contents of his library for an absent brother, became the preserver of many of the most valuable cla.s.sics. As Commander of the Guard he led the life of a peaceful student: as Patriarch of Byzantium his turbulence rent the fabric of Christendom, and he was 'alternately excommunicated and absolved by the synods of the East and West.' We owe the publication of the work called _The Myriad of Books_ to the circ.u.mstance that he was appointed to an emba.s.sy at Bagdad. His brother wrote to remind him of their pleasant evenings in the library when they explored the writings of the ancients and made an a.n.a.lysis of their contents. Photius was about to embark on a dangerous journey, and he was implored to leave a record of what had been done since his brother had last taken part in the readings.

The answer of Photius was the book already mentioned: he reviews nearly three hundred volumes of the historians and orators, the philosophers and theologians, the travellers and the writers of romance, and with an even facility 'abridges their narrative or doctrine and appreciates their style and character.'

The great Imperial library which stood by St. Sophia had been destroyed in the reign of Leo the Iconoclast in the preceding age, and in an earlier conflagration more than half a million books are said to have been lost from the basilica. The losses by fire were continual, but were constantly repaired. Leo the Philosopher, who was educated under the care of Photius, and his son and successor Constantine, were renowned as the restorers of learning, and the great writers of antiquity were collected again by their zeal in the square hall near the Public Treasury.

The boundaries of the realm of learning extended far beyond the limits of the Empire, and the Arabian science was equally famous among the Moors of Spain and in the further parts of Asia. We are told of a doctor refusing the invitation of the Sultan of Bokhara, 'because the carriage of his books would have required four hundred camels.' We know that the Ommiad dynasty formed the gigantic library at Cordova, and that there were at least seventy others in the colleges that were scattered through the kingdom of Granada. The prospect was very dark in other parts of Western Europe throughout the whole period of barbarian settlement. We shall not endeavour to trace the slight influences that preserved some knowledge of religious books at the Court of the Merovingian kings, or among the Visigoths and Ostrogoths and Burgundians. We prefer to pause at a moment preceding the final onslaught. The letters of Sidonius afford us a few glimpses of the literary condition of Southern Gaul soon after the invasion of Attila. The Bishop of Clermont gives us a delightful picture of his house: a verandah leads from the _atrium_ to the garden by the lake: we pa.s.s through a winter-parlour, a morning-room, and a north-parlour protected from the heat. Every detail seems to be complete; and yet we hear nothing of a library. The explanation seems to be that the Bishop was a close imitator of Pliny. The villa in Auvergne is a copy of the winter-refuge at Laurentum, where Pliny only kept 'a few cases contrived in the wall for the books that cannot be read too often.' But when the Bishop writes about his friends' houses we find many allusions to their libraries. Consentius sits in a large book-room when he is composing his verses or 'culling the flowers of his music.' When he visited the Prefect of Gaul, Sidonius declared that he was whirled along in a stream of delights. There were all kinds of out-door amus.e.m.e.nts and a library filled with books. 'You would fancy yourself among a Professor's book-cases, or in a book-shop, or amid the benches of a lecture-room.' The Bishop considered that this library of the Villa Prusiana was as good as anything that could be found in Rome or Alexandria. The books were arranged according to subjects. The room had a 'ladies' side'; and here were arranged the devotional works. The illuminated volumes, as far as can now be judged, were rather gaudy than brilliant, as was natural in an age of decadence; but St. Germa.n.u.s was a friend of the Bishop, and as we suppose of the Prefect, and his copy of the Gospels was in gold and silver letters on purple vellum, as may still be seen. By the gentlemen's seats were ranged the usual cla.s.sical volumes, all the works of Varro, which now exist only in fragments, and the poets sacred and profane; behind certain cross-benches was the literary food of a lighter kind, more suited to the weaker vessels without regard to s.e.x. Here every one found what would suit his own liking and capacity, and here on the day after their arrival the company worked hard after breakfast 'for four hours by the water clock.' Suddenly the door was thrown open, and in his uniform the head cook appeared and solemnly warned them all that their meal was served, and that it was as necessary to nourish the body as to stuff the mind with learning.

When the barbarians were established through Gaul and Italy the libraries in the old country-houses must have been completely destroyed. Some faint light of learning remained while Boethius 'trimmed the lamp with his skilful hand'; some knowledge of the cla.s.sics survived during the lives of Ca.s.siodorus and Isidore of Seville. Some of the original splendour may have lingered at Rome, and perhaps in Ravenna. When Boethius was awaiting his doom in the tower at Pavia, his mind reverted to the lettered ease of his life before he had offended the fierce Theodoric. His philosophy found comfort in thinking that all the valuable part of his books was firmly imprinted on his soul; but he never ceased regretting the walls inlaid with ivory and the shining painted windows in his old library at Rome.

CHAPTER II.

IRELAND--NORTHUMBRIA.

The knowledge of books might almost have disappeared in the seventh century, when the cloud of ignorance was darkest, but for a new and remarkable development of learning in the Irish monasteries.

This development is of special interest to ourselves from the fact that the church of Northumbria was long dependent on the Irish settlement at Iona. The Anglians taught by Paulinus very soon relapsed into paganism, and the second conversion of the North was due to the missionaries of the school of St. Columba. The power of Rome was established at the Council of Whitby; but in the days when Aidan preached at Lindisfarne the Northumbrians were still in obedience to an Irish rule, and were instructed and edified by the acts and lives of St. Patrick, of St.

Brigit, and the mighty Columba.

We shall quote some of the incidents recorded about the Irish books, a few legends of Patrick and dim traditions from the days of Columba, before noticing the rise of the English school.

The first mention of the Irish books seems to be contained in a pa.s.sage of aethicus. The cosmography ascribed to that name has been traced to very early times. It was long believed to have been written by St.

Jerome; but in its present form, at least, the work contains entries of a much later date. The pa.s.sage in which Ireland is mentioned may be even as late as the age of Columba.n.u.s, when Irish monks set up their churches at Wurzburg and on the sh.o.r.es of the Lake of Constance, or illuminated their ma.n.u.scripts at Bobbio under the protection of Theodolind and her successors in Lombardy. A wandering philosopher is represented as visiting the northern regions: he remained for a while in the Isle of Saints and turned over the painted volumes; but he despised the native churchmen and called them 'Doctors of Ignorance.' 'Here am I in Ireland, at the world's end, with much toil and little ease; with such unskilled labourers in the field the place is too doleful, and is absolutely of no good to me.'

Palladius came with twelve men to preach to the Gael, and we are told that he 'left his books' at Cellfine. The legendary St. Patrick is made to pa.s.s into Ulster, and he finds a King who burns himself and his home 'that he may not believe in Patrick.' The Saint proceeds to Tara with eight men and a little page carrying the book-wallet; 'it was like eight deer with one fawn following, and a white bird on its shoulder.'

The King and his chief Druid proposed a trial by ordeal. The King said, 'Put your books into the water.' 'I am ready for that,' said Patrick. But the Druid said, 'A G.o.d of water this man adores, and I will not take part in the ordeal.' The King said, 'Put your books into the fire.' 'I am ready for that,' said Patrick. 'A G.o.d of fire once in two years this man adores, and I will not do that,' said the Druid.

In the church by the oak-tree at Kildare St. Brigit had a marvellous book, or so her nuns supposed. The Kildare Gospels may have been illuminated as early as Columba's time. Gerard de Barri saw the book in the year 1185, and said that it was so brilliant in colouring, so delicate and finely drawn, and with such enlacements of intertwining lines that it seemed to be a work beyond the powers of mortal man, and to be worthy of an angel's skill; and, indeed, there was a strong belief that miraculous help had been given to the artist in his dreams.

The 'Book of Durrow' called _The Gospels of St. Columba_, almost rivals the famous 'Book of Kells' with which Mr. Madan will doubtless deal in his forthcoming volume on Ma.n.u.scripts. A native poet declared that when the Saint died in 597 he had illuminated 'three hundred bright n.o.ble books'; and he added that 'however long under water any book of the Saint's writing should be, not one single letter would be drowned.' Our authorities tell us that the Book of Durrow might possibly be one of the three hundred, 'as it bears some signs of being earlier in date than the Book of Kells.'

St. Columba, men said, was pa.s.sionately devoted to books. Yet he gave his Gospels to the Church at Swords, and presented the congregation at Derry with the volume that he had fetched from Tours, 'where it had lain on St.

Martin's breast a hundred years in the ground.' In one of the biographies there is a story about 'Langarad of the White Legs,' who dwelt in the region of Ossory. To him Columba came as a guest, and found that the sage was hiding all his books away. Then Columba left his curse upon them; 'May that,' quoth he, 'about which thou art so n.i.g.g.ardly be never of any profit after thee'; and this was fulfilled, 'for the books remain to this day, and no man reads them.' When Langarad died 'all the book-satchels in Ireland that night fell down'; some say, 'all the satchels and wallets in the saint's house fell then: and Columba and all who were in his house marvelled at the noisy shaking of the books.' So then speaks Columba: 'Langarad in Ossory,' quoth he, 'is just now dead.' 'Long may it be ere that happens,' said Baithen. 'May the burden of that disbelief fall on him and not on thee,' said Columba.

Another tradition relates to St. Finnen's book that caused a famous battle; and that was because of a false judgment which King Diarmid gave against Columba, when he copied St. Finnen's Psalter without leave. St.

Finnen claimed the copy as being the produce of his original, and on the appeal to the court at Tara his claim was confirmed. King Diarmid decided that to every mother-book belongs the child-book, as to the cow belongs her calf; 'and so,' said the King, 'the book that you wrote, Columba, belongs to Finnen by right.' 'That is an unjust judgment,' said Columba, 'and I will avenge it upon you.'

Not long afterwards the Saint was insulted by the seizure and execution of an offender who had taken sanctuary and was clasped in his arms.

Columba went over the wild mountains and raised the tribes of Tyrconnell and Tyrone, and defeated King Diarmid in battle. When the Saint went to Iona he left the copy of Finnen's Psalter to the head of the chief tribe in Tyrconnell. It was called the _Book of the Battle_, and if they carried it three times round the enemy, in the sun's course, they were sure to return victorious. The book was the property of the O'Donnells till the dispersion of their clan. The gilt and jewelled case in which it rests was made in the eleventh century: a frame round the inner shrine was added by Daniel O'Donnell, who fought in the Battle of the Boyne. A large fragment of the book remained in a Belgian monastery in trust for the true representative of the clan; and soon after Waterloo it was given up to Sir Neal O'Donnell, to whose family it still belongs. It is now shown at the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. 'The fragment of the original _Book of the Battle_', says O'Curry, 'is of small quarto form, consisting of fifty-eight leaves of fine vellum, written in a small, uniform, but rather hurried hand, with some slight attempts at illumination.'

We have now to describe the great increase of books in Northumbria. In the year 635 Aidan set up his quarters with a few Irish monks on the Isle of Lindisfarne, and his Abbey soon became one of the main repositories of learning.

The book called _The Gospels of St. Cuthbert_ was written in 688, and was regarded for nearly two centuries as the chief ornament of Lindisfarne.

The monastery was burned by the Danes, and the servants of St. Cuthbert, who had concealed the 'Gospels' in his grave, wandered forth, with the Saint's body in an ark and the book in its chest, in search of a new place of refuge. They attempted a voyage to Ireland, but their ship was driven back by a storm. The book-chest had been washed overboard, but in pa.s.sing up the Solway Firth they saw the book shining in its golden cover upon the sand. For more than a century afterwards the book shared the fortunes of a wandering company of monks: in the year 995 it was laid on St. Cuthbert's coffin in the new church at Durham; early in the twelfth century it returned to Lindisfarne. Here it remained until the dissolution of the monasteries, when its golden covers were torn off, and the book came bare and unadorned into the hands of Sir Robert Cotton, and pa.s.sed with the rest of his treasures into the library of the British Museum.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INITIAL LETTER FROM THE GOSPELS OF ST. CUTHBERT.]

Theodore of Tarsus had been consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 669. He brought with him a large quant.i.ty of books for use in his new Greek school. These books were left by his will to the cathedral library, where they remained for ages without disturbance. William Lambarde, the Kentish antiquary, has left an account of their appearance.

He was speaking of Archbishop Parker, 'whose care for the conservation of ancient monuments can never be sufficiently commended.' 'The reverend Father,' he added, 'showed me the _Psalter of David_, and sundry homilies in Greek, and Hebrew also, and some other Greek authors, beautifully written on thick paper with the name of this Theodore prefixed,' to whose library the Archbishop thought that they had belonged, 'being thereto led by a show of great antiquity.'

The monks of Canterbury claimed to possess the books on pink vellum, with rubricated capitals, which Pope Gregory had sent to Augustine. One of these afterwards belonged to Parker, who gave it to Corpus Christi at Cambridge: the experts now believe that it was written in the eighth century 'in spite of the ancient appearance of the figure-painting.'

Another is the _Psalter of St. Augustine_, now preserved among the Cottonian MSS. This is also considered to be a writing of the eighth century.

In the Bodleian library there is a third example, written in quarto with large uncial letters in double columns, in much the same style as the book given by Parker to Corpus Christi. The Bodleian specimen is especially interesting as containing on the fly-leaf a list in Anglo-Saxon of the contents of the library of Solomon the Priest, with notes as to other small collections.

We have reached the period in which Northumbria became for a time the centre of Western culture. The supremacy of Rome, set up at the Council of Whitby, was fostered and sustained by the introduction of the Italian arts. Vast quant.i.ties of books were imported. Stately Abbeys were rising along the coast, and students were flocking to seek the fruits of the new learning in well-filled libraries and bustling schools. We may judge how bright the prospect seemed by the tone of Alcuin's letters to Charles the Great. He tells the Emperor of certain 'exquisite books' which he had studied under Egbert at York. The schools of the North are compared to 'a garden enclosed' and to the beds of spices: he asks that some of the young men may be sent over to procure books, so that in Tours as well as at York they may gather the flowers of the garden and share in the 'outgoings of Paradise.' A few years afterwards came the news of the harrying of Northumbria by the Vikings. The libraries were burned, and Northumbria was overwhelmed in darkness and slavery; and Alcuin wrote again, 'He who can hear of this calamity and not cry to G.o.d on behalf of his country, must have a heart not of flesh but of stone.'

Benedict Biscop was our first English book-collector. The son of a rich Thane might have looked to a political career; he preferred to devote himself to learning, and would have spent his life in a Roman monastery if the Pope had not ordered him to return to England in company with Theodore of Tarsus. His first expedition was made with his friend St.

Wilfrid. They crossed in a ship provided by the King of Kent. Travelling together as far as Lyons, Wilfrid remained there for a time, and Benedict pushed on to Mont Cenis, and so to Rome, after a long and perilous journey. On a second visit he received the tonsure, and went back to work at Lindisfarne; but about two years afterwards he obtained a pa.s.sage to Italy in a trading-vessel, and it was on this occasion that he received the Pope's commands. Four years elapsed before he was in Rome again: throughout the year 671 he was ama.s.sing books by purchase and by the gifts of his friends; and returning by Vienne he found another large store awaiting him which he had ordered on his outward journey. Benedict was able to set up a good library in his new Abbey at Wearmouth; but his zeal appears to have been insatiable. We find him for the fifth time at the mart of learning, and bringing home, as Bede has told us, 'a mult.i.tude of books of all kinds.' He divided his new wealth between the Church at Wearmouth and the Abbey at Jarrow, across the river. Ceolfrid of Jarrow himself made a journey to Rome with the object of augmenting Benedict's 'most n.o.ble and copious store'; but he gave to the King of Northumbria, in exchange for a large landed estate, the magnificent 'Cosmography' which his predecessor had brought to Wearmouth.

St. Wilfrid presented to his church at Ripon a _Book of the Gospels_ on purple vellum, and a Bible with covers of pure gold inlaid with precious stones. John the Precentor, who introduced the Roman liturgy into this country, bequeathed a number of valuable books to Wearmouth. Bede had no great library of his own; it was his task 'to disseminate the treasures of Benedict.' But he must have possessed a large number of ma.n.u.scripts while he was writing the Ecclesiastical History, since he has informed us that Bishop Daniel of Winchester and other learned churchmen in the South were accustomed to supply him constantly with records and chronicles.