withstanding, might be useful to
learned men, except any will deny apothecaries the privilege of keeping
poison in their shops, when they can make antidotes of them. But besides
this, what beautiful bibles! Rare fathers! Subtle schoolmen! Useful
historians! Ancient! Middle! Modern! What painful comments were here
amongst them! What monuments of mathematics all massacred together!"[14]

More than a cart load of manuscripts were taken away from Merton College
and destroyed, and a vast number from the Baliol and New Colleges,
Oxford;[15] but these instances might be infinitely multiplied, so
terrible were those intemperate outrages. All this tends to enforce upon
us the necessity of using considerable caution in forming an opinion of
the nature and extent of learning prevalent during those ages which
preceded the discovery of the art of printing.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The sad page in the Annals of Literary History recording the
destruction of books and MSS. fully prove this assertion. In France,
in the year 1790, 4,194,000 volumes were burnt belonging to the
suppressed monasteries, about 25,000 of these were manuscripts.

[8] "About this time (Feb. 25, 1550) the Council book mentions the
king's sending a letter for the purging his library at Westminster.
The persons are not named, but the business was to cull out all
superstitious books, as missals, legends, and such like, and to
deliver the garniture of the books, being either gold or silver, to
Sir Anthony Aucher. These books were many of them plated with gold
and silver and curiously embossed. This, as far as we can collect,
was the superstition that destroyed them. Here avarice had a very
thin disguise, and the courtiers discovered of what spirit they were
to a remarkable degree."--Collier's Eccle. History, vol. ii. p. 307.

[9] Any one who can inspect a library of ancient books will find
proof of this. A collection of vellum scraps which I have derived
from these sources are very exciting to a bibliomaniac, a choice
line so abruptly broken, a monkish or classical verse so cruelly
mutilated! render an inspection of this odd collection, a
tantalizing amusement.

[10] Bale's Leland's Laboryouse Journey, Preface.

[11] The works of the Schoolmen, viz.: of P. Lombard, T. Aquinas,
Scotus and his followers and critics also, and such that had popish
scholars in them they cast out of all college li