ellerophon with the letter, but he
only cares for the choice vellum and bosses of gold. 'I cannot conceive,'
said Lucian, 'what you expect to get out of your books; yet you are
always poring over them, and binding and tying them, and rubbing them
with saffron and oil of cedar, as if they could make you eloquent, when
by nature you are as dumb as a fish.' He compares the industrious dunce
to an ass at a music-book, or to a monkey that remains a monkey still for
all the gold on its jacket. 'If books,' he adds, 'have made you what you
are, I am sure that you ought of all things to avoid them.'

After the building of Constantinople a home for literature was found in
the eastern cities; and, as the boundaries of the empire were broken down
by the Saracen advance, learning gradually retired to the colleges and
basilicas of the capital, and to the Greek monasteries of stony Athos,
and Patmos, and the 'green Erebinthus.' Among the Romans of the East we
cannot discern many learned men, but we know that there was a multitude
ready to assist in the preservation of learning. The figures of three or
four true book-lovers stand out amid the crowd of _dilettanti_. St.
Pamphilus was a student at the legal University of Beyrout before he was
received into the Church: he devoted himself afterwards to the school of
sacred learning which he established at Caesarea in Palestine. Here he
gathered together about 30,000 volumes, almost all consisting of the
works of the Fathers. His personal labour was given to the works of
Origen, in whose mystical doctrine he had become a proficient at
Alexandria. The martyrdom of Pamphilus prevented the completion of his
own elaborate commentaries. He left the library to the Church of Caesarea,
under the superintendence of his friend Eusebius. St. Jerome paid a visit
to the collection while he was still enrolled on the list of
bibliophiles. He had bought the best books to be found at Treves and
Aquileia; he had seen the wealth of Rome, and was on his way to the
oriental splendour of Constantinople: it is from him that we first hear
of the gold and silver inks and the Tyrian purple of the vellum. He
declared that he had never seen anything to compare with the library of
Pamphilus; and when he was given twenty-five volumes of Origen in the
martyr's delicate writing, he vowed that he felt richer than if he had
found the wealth of Croesus.

The Emperor Julian was a pupil of Eusebius, and became reader for a tim