clearness, sometimes slowly, so that the letters cannot be read till
next day. It is not always successful; it is of no use to apply it to
writing in red, and its smell is overpowering, but it is the elixir of
palaeographers.

Yet, when all has been done, there is a sadly large percentage of MSS.
which preserve an obstinate silence. They have been rebound (that is
common), and have lost their fly-leaves in the process, or, worse than
that, they have lain tossing about without a binding and their first and
last quires have dropped away. In such cases we can only tell, from our
previous experience in ancient handwritings, the date and country of
their origin.

ENGLISH LIBRARIES

And now to turn to some individual libraries. Some of the most venerable
have practically disappeared--that of Glastonbury, for instance, the
premier abbey of England, the only one which lived through from British
to Saxon times.[C] To it we might reasonably look to trace many an
ancient book belonging to the days of the old British Church. Leland,
who visited the library not long before the Dissolution, represents
himself as overawed by its antiquity. But almost the only record he
quotes is one by "Melkinus," which most modern writers think was a late
forgery. However, there is in the Bodleian one British book from
Glastonbury, written, at least in part, in Cornwall, and preserving
remnants of the learning of the British clergy. It has portions of Ovid
and of Latin grammar, and passages of the Bible in Greek and Latin. The
catalogue, too, shows that there were in fact a good number of old MSS.,
and also that the monks of the fourteenth century did not care much
about them, for they are marked as "Old and useless," "Old and in bad
condition" (_debilis_), and so on. The actual extant books which we can
trace to this foundation are few and for the most part late.

St. Albans, founded by King Offa in the eighth century, has left us, as
I said, no catalogue, but there are many of its books in our libraries.
Two groups of them stand out. First are those procured by Abbot Simon
(1166-1188) and Prior Mathias. These are very finely written. A typical
and very interesting specimen is a Bible at Eton (26) which has three
columns to a page--a rare distinction in the twelfth century, pointing,
perhaps, to its having been copied from a very early and venerable
model. It has a sister book at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and another--a
New Testament--at Trin