e Goths begun."

Our readers have often seen with what rapidity a fog swallows up a
landscape. They have marked, with a feeling of despair, golden peak and
emerald valley sinking hopelessly in the dank drizzle. So the classics
went down before the monks. The ancients were set a-trudging through the
world in a monk's cowl and a friar's frock. On the same page from which
Cicero had thundered, a monk now discoursed. Where Livy's pictured
narrative had been, you found only a dull wearisome legend. Where the
thunder of Homer's lyre or the sweet notes of Virgil's muse had
resounded, you heard now a dismal croak or a lugubrious chant. Such was
the strange metamorphosis which the ancients were compelled to endure at
the hands of the' monks; and such was the way in which they strove to
earn the gratitude of succeeding ages by the benefits they conferred on
learning.

It gives us pleasure to say that Cardinal Mai was amongst the most
distinguished of those who undertook the task of setting free the
imprisoned ancients,--of stripping them of the monk's hood and the
friar's habit, and presenting them to the world in their own form. He
laboured in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and succeeded in exhuming from
darkness and dust the treasures which neglect and superstition had
buried there. In the number of the works which the monks had
palimpsested, and which Mai rescued from destruction, we may cite some
fragments of Homer, with a great number of paintings equally ancient,
and of which the subjects are taken from the works of this great poet;
the unpublished writings of Cornelius Fronto; the unpublished letters of
Antoninus Pius, of Marcus Aurelius, of Lucius Verus, and of Appian; some
fragments of discourses of Aurelius Symmachus; the Roman Antiquities of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which were up to that time imperfect;
unpublished fragments of Plautus, of Isaeus, of Themistius; an
unpublished work of the philosopher Porphyrius; some writings of the Jew
Philo; the ancient interpreters of Virgil; two books of the Chronicles
of Eusebius Pamphilus; the VI. and XIV. Sibylline Books; and the six
books of the Republic of Cicero. I saw, too, in the Biblioteca
Ambrosiana, fragments of the version of the Bible made in the middle of
the fourth century, by Ulfila, bishop of the Maesogoths. The labours of
the bishop underwent a strange dispersion. The gospels are at Upsala;
the epistles were found at Wolfenbuttel; while a portion of the Acts of
t