t. Gall. 'By
good fortune,' he says, 'we were at Constance without anything to do, and
it occurred to us to go to the monastery about twenty miles off to see
the place where the Quintilian was shut up.' The Abbey had been founded
by the Irish missionaries who destroyed the idols of Suabia, when
according to the ancient legend the mountain-demon vainly called on the
spirit of the lake to join in resisting the foe. Its library had been
celebrated in the ninth century, when the Hungarian terror fell upon
Europe, and the barbarian armies in one and the same day 'laid in ashes
the monastery of St. Gall and the city of Bremen on the shores of the
Northern ocean'; but the books had been fortunately removed to the Abbey
of Reichenau on an island in the Rhine. 'We went to the place,' said
Poggio, 'to amuse ourselves and to look at the books. Among them we found
the Quintilian safe and sound, but all coated with dust. The books were
by no means housed as they deserved, but were all in a dark and noisome
place at the foot of a tower, into which one would not cast a criminal
condemned to death.' He describes the finding of several other rare MSS.,
and says: 'I have copied them all out in great haste, and have sent them
to Florence.'

In 1418 he visited England in the train of Cardinal Beaufort. He said
that he was unable to procure any transcripts, though he visited some of
the principal libraries, and must have seen that the collection at the
Grey Friars at least was 'well stocked with books.' He was more
successful on the Continent, where he brought the _History_ of Ammianus
out of a German prison into the free air of the republic of letters. He
gave the original to Cardinal Colonna, and wrote to Aretino about
transcripts: 'Niccolo has copied it on paper for Cosmo de' Medici: you
must write to Carlo Aretino for another copy, or he might lend you the
original, because if the scribe should be an ignoramus you might get a
fable instead of a history.'

Among the pupils of Chrysoloras, Guarini of Verona was esteemed the
keenest philologist, and John Aurispa as having the most extended
knowledge of the classics. Aurispa, says Hallam, came rather late from
Sicily, but his labours were not less profitable than those of his
predecessors; in the year 1423 he brought back from Greece considerably
more than two hundred MSS. of authors hardly known in Italy; and the list
includes books of Plato, of Pindar, and of Strabo, of which all knowled