ce
and favored few; thousands there are in the royal library of France, and
thousands too reposing on the dusty shelves of the Bodleian and Cottonian
libraries in England; and yet, these numbers are but a small portion--a
mere relic--of the intellectual productions of a past and obscure
age.[7] The barbarians, who so frequently convulsed the more civilized
portions of Europe, found a morbid pleasure in destroying those works
which bore evidence to the mental superiority of their enemies. In
England, the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans were each successively
the destroyers of literary productions. The Saxon Chronicle, that
invaluable repository of the events of so many years, bears ample
testimony to numerous instances of the loss of libraries and works of
art, from fire, or by the malice of designing foes. At some periods, so
general was this destruction, so unquenchable the rapacity of those who
caused it, that instead of feeling surprised at the manuscripts of those
ages being so few and scanty, we have cause rather to wonder that so many
have been preserved. For even the numbers which escaped the hands of the
early and unlettered barbarians met with an equally ignominious fate from
those for whom it would be impossible to hold up the darkness of their
age as a plausible excuse for the commission of this egregious folly.
These men over whose sad deeds the bibliophile sighs with mournful
regret, were those who carried out the Reformation, so glorious in its
results; but the righteousness of the means by which those results were
effected are very equivocal indeed. When men form themselves into a
faction and strive for the accomplishment of one purpose, criminal deeds
are perpetrated with impunity, which, individually they would blush and
scorn to do; they feel no direct responsibility, no personal restraint;
and, such as possess fierce passions, under the cloak of an organized
body, give them vent and gratification; and those whose better feelings
lead them to contemplate upon these things content themselves with the
conclusion, that out of evil cometh good.

The noble art of printing was unable, with all its rapid movements, to
rescue from destruction the treasures of the monkish age; the advocates
of the Reformation eagerly sought for and as eagerly destroyed those old
popish volumes, doubtless there was much folly, much exaggerated
superstition pervading them; but there was also some truth, a few facts
worth knowi