FullReads

Meanwhile Libri’s reputation had been thoroughly blown upon, and he retired from France, and was dead in Italy or elsewhere before his crimes had been atoned for. A great mass of his accumulations was bought from the Ashburnhams by the Italians and is now at Florence. Madame Libri survived, like Madame Fosco, to defend his memory.

To return. In spite of the long history and great wealth of Bordeaux, Marseilles, Arles, Narbonne, Toulouse, you will not trace many famous books to those places. The city which, on the whole, has preserved its early manuscripts best is Albi, but it was never a great centre of learning, and its library, though extremely interesting, is not large.

However, we need not be surprised at the poverty of a region which has had to undergo Albigensian crusades, English occupation, wars of religion, and a revolution.

Some of the great early libraries of Germany were mentioned in our historical survey. Fulda and Lorsch were as remarkable as any. At the present day Fulda retains only the few Bonifacian MSS. which rank as relics of the saint–the blood-stained volume of Ambrose which was on Boniface when the pagans killed him, his pocket copy of the Gospels, the MS. written for Victor of Capua. The bulk of its abbey library, which remained together until the close of the sixteenth century, is dispersed and gone, no one knows where. Some books are at Cassel in the ducal library. Lorsch has nothing in situ, but a good deal in the Vatican. Both houses were instrumental in preserving the classics; we owe to them Suetonius, Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus, and part of Livy.

The Thirty Years’ War was responsible for a good deal of dispersion. Cargoes of books made their way to England, and Archbishop Laud bought and gave to the Bodleian many from Wuerzburg and Erfuert; in the Arundel collection at the British Museum the German contingent is large. Sweden also profited at this time, and got its lovely Codex Aureus (once at Canterbury), its Codex Argenteus (the Gothic Gospels at Upsala), and its Gigas, or Devil’s Bible, which came from Prague.

In the Revolutionary period there was extensive secularization of abbeys, and whole libraries passed into central depots, as at Munich, which has the MSS. of St. Emmeram of Ratisbon and of Tegernsee, Benedictbeuern, Schaeftlarn, and many other houses. Those of the old and rich foundation of Reichenau passed to Carlsruhe. Precious books, like the gold-covered Gospels of Lindau, were exported. This particular gem was bought by Lord Ashburnham, and in recent years has gone to America. Fine Gospels and other service-books from Weingarten are at Holkham; they appeal to the Englishman, for they contain pictures of our sainted King Oswald, of whom Weingarten owned a relic.

North Germany’s contribution is far inferior to that of Bavaria and the Rhine provinces. The inhabitants of large regions were pagans till a late date (some might say they were so still), and have never, we conceive, been really civilized. Few books were made there before the fourteenth century, and I know of no good libraries that existed there in the medieval period. A good part of the contents of one at Elbing, near Dantzic, came somehow to Cambridge (Corpus Christi) in the seventeenth century; it is a dreary collection, mostly on paper, of scholastic theology, sermons, meditations, and a little medicine.

In Austria the abbeys were let alone till 1918. Such houses as Melk on the Danube, St. Florian, St. Paul in Carinthia, Admont in Styria, still owned their estates, their revenues, and their libraries. That of Melk is noticeable, and at St. Paul is, oddly enough, one of the very earliest Irish vernacular MSS. I believe it came thither in fairly recent times from St. Blasien in the Black Forest. But, on the whole, these places were too remote from the main stream to accumulate many treasures of the very first quality.

LATIN MSS. IN ENGLAND

Let me now turn to England, and treat in greater detail of the monastic and cathedral libraries there, and what happened to them. The Dissolution, as we know, occurred here near on 400 years ago, which makes the task of tracing the books at once harder and more fascinating than in the case of France or Germany, where a whole library may be found practically intact in a town near its old home. Of course, what was done there ought to have been done here. Leland, the King’s antiquary, the abusive Protestant, John Bale, and the foolish but learned Dr. John Dee, begged that it might be done. Yet, whatever Henry VIII’s or Mary’s or Elizabeth’s intentions may have been at times as to the foundation of a “solempne library” where the ancient books of the realm might be stored, they got but a very little way. Leland did secure some MSS. for the Royal Library, perhaps most from Rochester, but upon the whole the work was left in Elizabeth’s days to individual enthusiasts–Sir Robert Cotton, Archbishop Parker, and Dee and Bale themselves. Others who did good work were Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel; Lord William Howard; Long Harry Savile of Bank; Laurence Nowell, who rescued Anglo-Saxon books; Nicholas Brigam, who was interested in English literature and built Chaucer’s tomb in the Abbey; the Theyers of Brockworth, near Gloucester. These are names to some of which we shall return; it would be well at this moment to take a few libraries one by one and see what can be said of them.