room where a single person read aloud in the
hearing of many the volume to be
reproduced, and that so produced they were
relatively cheap. Had they not been so, they
would hardly have been, as Horace represents
them, among the habitual spoils of the grocer.[8]
It is sad, and is suggestive of many
inquiries, that this abundance was followed,
at least in the West, by a famine of more
than a thousand years. And it is hard, even
after all allowances, to conceive that of all
the many manuscripts of Homer which Italy
must have possessed we do not know that a
single parchment or papyrus was ever read
by a single individual, even in a convent, or
even by a giant such as Dante, or as Thomas
Acquinas, the first of them unquestionably
master of all the knowledge that was within
the compass of his age. There were,
however, libraries even in the West, formed by
Charlemagne and by others after him. We
are told that Alcuin, in writing to the great
monarch, spoke with longing of the relative
wealth of England in these precious estates.
Mr. Edwards, whom I have already quoted,
mentions Charles the Fifth of France, in 1365,
as a collector of manuscripts. But some ten
years back the Director of the Bibliotheque
Nationale informed me that the French King
John collected twelve hundred manuscripts,