en beyond the walls of a convent or those
of a native town their names were unknown, their personality
unrecognised. Except to the theologian or ritualist how repellent and
illegible this mass of printed and manuscript matter must ever seem!
How deficient in human sympathy and pertinence! These treatises, so
erudite, so prolix, and so multifarious, were composed by men
(Universal, Irrefragable, or Seraphic Doctors), and after a certain
date by women too (Angelical Sisters), who had no knowledge of the
world, of society, of human nature, or of real philosophy. Yet they
were, and long remained, the class of literature most cultivated, most
studied, and most multiplied; and to this hour, notwithstanding the
destruction of millions of them, they abound in our national,
cathedral, and college libraries, and in private collections dedicated
to that particular side of inquiry and learning. In the booksellers'
catalogues we sometimes meet with examples, which are recommended to
the curious buyer by their illustrations of conventual life, and their
exposure of those vices which a state of celibacy is calculated to
promote in both sexes. The chained book is not an uncommon feature in
the ancient ecclesiastical repositories, and even in certain churches;
and apart from the Scriptures, it almost invariably enters into the
department of early divinity or polemics.

Whatever may be thought of this branch of the theological library,
there is an undoubted market for it, or some portions of it, as stocks
are kept both here and abroad, although on a more restricted scale,
perhaps, than formerly. It is extremely probable that, if any one who
was learned enough and dexterous enough should make a decoction of all
the uncountable folios which exist up and down the globe, the result
might be a single volume of not very ample dimensions, affording its
share of insight and edification.

The call on the part of a narrow coterie of churchmen for the Catholic
literature of the sixteenth and succeeding centuries, more especially
the books produced at Continental presses, necessarily resulted in the
rapid inflation of the value, while it brought to light from
numberless recesses a vast assemblage of works previously undescribed
and unknown. Many of these works were produced at obscure localities
in France and the Netherlands; but Paris, Douay, Brussels, Antwerp,
Mecklin, Tournai, Bruges, Ghent, Breda, are responsible for a
majority. Besides the pu