Cassiodorus has led us below the date of the "classical"
period, for he died in 583. For one moment I revert to the earlier time
to record an interesting example of wandering. Illustrated books of the
early centuries are the greatest of rarities. The two Virgils, the
Vienna and the Cotton Genesis, the Homer at Milan, the Gospels of
Rossano in Calabria and those of Sinope now at Paris, the Dioscorides at
Vienna, the Pentateuch of Tours, the Joshua-roll at the Vatican--these
are the most famous, and there are very few beside them. Among those few
are some pieces of a Latin Bible written in the fourth century, and
containing parts of Samuel and Kings, with paintings which, when fresh,
must have been of high excellence. They have unhappily suffered grievous
damage, for they were used in the seventeenth century to make covers for
municipal documents at the royal and ancient abbatial town of
Quedlinburg (the scene of Canning's _Rovers_). The painted leaves are
now at Berlin; a leaf of plain text remains at Quedlinburg. No one
doubts that the book to which they belonged was made in Italy, and the
likeliest history that can be imagined for it is that it was brought as
a gift to the abbey by a German prince, say in the tenth century. It is
hard to explain the neglect and mutilation of so noble a book, in whose
contents there was nothing to offend Protestant or other religious
susceptibilities. Only we find, by numerous examples, that the MSS. we
should most prize now, those written in capitals or uncials with the
words undivided, or in Irish or English scripts which became
unfamiliar, were uniformly despised and neglected by the readers of
later centuries. We meet with notes of this kind in monastic catalogues:
"It cannot be read," "Old and useless," and the like. Still, one would
have thought that the pictures of the Quedlinburg book would have saved
it, even in a German nunnery.

CHRONOLOGICAL SURVEY

Since this little book is not a treatise on palaeography, a manual of
art, or a history of learning, and yet has to touch upon all three
provinces, it is important to keep it from straying too far into any of
them, and this is one of the most difficult tasks that I have ever
enterprised. The temptation to dilate upon the beauty and intrinsic
interest of the MSS. and upon the characteristic scripts of different
ages and countries is hard to resist. And, indeed, without some slight
elucidation of such matters my readers may be v