d to possess the
classic appearance of hoary antiquity, may be nothing more than a
complimentary note, or the worthless accounts of some monastic
expenditure. But, careful as they were, what would these monks have
thought of "paper-sparing Pope," who wrote his Iliad on small pieces of
refuse paper? One of the finest passages in that translation, which
describes the parting of Hector and Andromache, is written on part of a
letter which Addison had franked, and is now preserved in the British
Museum. Surely he could afford, these old monks would have said, to
expend some few shillings for paper, on which to inscribe that for which
he was to receive his thousand pounds.

But far from the monastic manuscripts displaying a scantiness of
parchment, we almost invariably find an abundant margin, and a space
between each line almost amounting to prodigality; and to say that the
"vellum was considered more precious than the genius of the author,"[81]
is absurd, when we know that, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
a dozen skins of parchment could be bought for sixpence; whilst that
quantity written upon, if the subject possessed any interest at all,
would fetch considerably more, there always being a demand and ready sale
for books.[82] The supposition, therefore, that the monastic scribes
erased _classical_ manuscripts for the sake of the material, seems
altogether improbable, and certainly destitute of proof. It is true, many
of the classics, as we have them now, are but mere fragments of the
original work. For this, however, we have not to blame the monks, but
barbarous invaders, ravaging flames, and the petty animosities of civil
and religious warfare for the loss of many valuable works of the
classics. By these means, one hundred and five books of Livy have been
lost to us, probably forever. For the thirty which have been preserved,
our thanks are certainly due to the monks. It was from their unpretending
and long-forgotten libraries that many such treasures were brought forth
at the revival of learning, in the fifteenth century, to receive the
admiration of the curious, and the study of the erudite scholar. In this
way Poggio Bracciolini discovered many inestimable manuscripts. Leonardo
Aretino writes in rapturous terms on Poggio's discovery of a perfect copy
of Quintillian. "What a precious acquisition!" he exclaims, "what
unthought of pleasure to behold Quintillian perfect and entire!"[83] In
the same letter we l