d gone, and the flowers
have appeared in our land. Then the scholar we are speaking of, a
neglecter rather than an inspecter of books, will stuff his volume with
violets, and primroses, with roses and quatrefoil. Then he will use
his wet and perspiring hands to turn over the volumes; then he will
thump the white vellum with gloves covered with all kinds of dust, and
with his finger clad in long-used leather will hunt line by line
through the page; then at the sting of the biting flea the sacred book
is flung aside, and is hardly shut for another month, until it is so
full of the dust that has found its way within, that it resists the
effort to close it.

But the handling of books is specially to be forbidden to those
shameless youths, who as soon as they have learned to form the shapes
of letters, straightway, if they have the opportunity, become unhappy
commentators, and wherever they find an extra margin about the text,
furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if any other frivolity strikes
their fancy, at once their pen begins to write it. There the Latinist
and sophister and every unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen,
a practice that we have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and
value of the most beautiful books.

Again, there is a class of thieves shamefully mutilating books, who cut
away the margins from the sides to use as material for letters, leaving
only the text, or employ the leaves from the ends, inserted for the
protection of the book, for various uses and abuses--a kind of
sacrilege which should be prohibited by the threat of anathema.

Again, it is part of the decency of scholars that whenever they return
from meals to their study, washing should invariably precede reading,
and that no grease-stained finger should unfasten the clasps, or turn
the leaves of a book. Nor let a crying child admire the pictures in
the capital letters, lest he soil the parchment with wet fingers; for a
child instantly touches whatever he sees. Moreover, the laity, who
look at a book turned upside down just as if it were open in the right
way, are utterly unworthy of any communion with books. Let the clerk
take care also that the smutty scullion reeking from his stewpots does
not touch the lily leaves of books, all unwashed, but he who walketh
without blemish shall minister to the precious volumes. And, again,
the cleanliness of decent hands would be of great benefit to books as
well as scholars, if it w