e
in the Church at Caesarea. He was passionately fond of books, and
possessed libraries at Antioch and Constantinople, as well as in his
beloved 'Lutetia' on the island in the Seine. A sentence from one of his
letters was carved over the door of his library at Antioch: 'Some love
horses, or hawks and hounds, but I from my boyhood have pined with a
desire for books.'

It is said that another of his libraries was burned by his successor
Jovian in a parody of Alexander's Feast. It is true, at any rate, that
the book-butcher set fire to the books at Antioch as part of his revenge
against the Apostate. One is tempted to dwell on the story of these
massacres. In many a war, as an ancient bibliophile complained, have
books been dispersed abroad, 'dismembered, stabbed, and mutilated': 'they
were buried in the earth or drowned in the sea, and slain by all kinds of
slaughter.' 'How much of their blood the warlike Scipio shed: how many on
the banishment of Boethius were scattered like sheep without a shepherd!'
Perhaps the subject should be isolated in a separate volume, where the
rude Omar, and Jovian, and the despoilers of the monasteries, might be
pilloried. Seneca would be indicted for his insult to Cleopatra's books:
Sir Thomas Browne might be in danger for his saying, that 'he could with
patience behold the urn and ashes of the Vatican, could he with a few
others recover the perished leaves of Solomon.' He might escape by virtue
of his saving clause, and some excuse would naturally be found for
Seneca; but the rest might be treated like those Genoese criminals who
were commemorated on marble tablets as 'the worst of mankind.'

For several generations after the establishment of the Eastern Empire,
Constantinople was the literary capital of the world and the main
repository of the arts and sciences. Mr. Middleton has lately shown us in
his work upon Illuminated Manuscripts that Persia and Egypt, as well as
the Western Countries, 'contributed elements both of design and technical
skill which combined to create the new school of Byzantine art.'
Constantinople, he tells us, became for several centuries the main centre
for the production of manuscripts. Outside the domain of art we find
little among the Romans of the East that can in any sense be called
original. They were excellent at an epitome or a lexicon, and were very
successful as librarians. The treasures of antiquity, as Gibbon has said,
were imparted in such extracts an