od old monks, who seemed a cheerful and contented set.

The library contained about eight hundred volumes, of which nearly two
hundred were manuscripts on vellum. Amongst these were conspicuous the
entire works of St. Chrysostom, in eight large folio volumes complete;
and a manuscript of the Scala Perfectionis in Greek, containing a number
of most exquisite miniatures in a brilliant state of preservation. It
was a quarto of the tenth or eleventh century, and a most
unexceptionable tome, which these unkind monks preferred keeping to
themselves instead of letting me have it, as they ought to have done.
The miniatures were first-rate works of Byzantine art. It was a terrible
pang to me to leave such a book behind. There were also a Psalter with
several miniatures, but these were partially damaged; five or six copies
of the Gospels; two fine folio volumes of the Menologia, or Lives of the
Saints; and sundry [Greek: omoilogoi] and books of divinity,
and the works of the fathers. On paper there were two hundred more
manuscripts, amongst which was a curious one of the Acts and Epistles,
full of large miniatures and illuminations exceedingly well done. As it
is quite clear that all these manuscripts are older than the time of the
patriarch Jeremias, they confirm my opinion that he could not have been
the original founder of the monastery.

It is an hour's scramble over the rocks from Stavroniketa to the
monastery of

PANTOCRATORAS.

This edifice was built by Manuel and Alexius Comnenus, and Johannes
Pumicerius, their brother. It was subsequently repaired by Barbulus and
Gabriel, two Wallachian nobles. The church is handsome and curious, and
contains several relics, but the reliquaries are not of much beauty, nor
of very great antiquity. Among them, however, is a small thick quarto
volume about five inches square every way, in the handwriting, as you
are told, of St. John of Kalavita. Now St. John of Kalavita was a hermit
who died in the year 450, and his head is shown at Besancon, in the
church of St. Stephen, to which place it was taken after the siege of
Constantinople. Howbeit this manuscript did not seem to me to be older
than the twelfth century, or the eleventh at the earliest It is written
in a very minute hand, and contains the Gospels, some prayers, and lives
of saints, and is ornamented with some small illuminations. The binding
is very curious: it is entirely of silver gilt, and is of great
antiquity. The back pa