mquam in urbe Regia natae_ [I do
not quite understand this antithesis] sine querela Provincialium
congregantur.']

[Footnote 789: 'Labores, violenti magistri, solliciti paedagogi, per
quos cautior quis efficitur dum incurri pericula formidantur.']

'Such men ought assuredly to receive their stipulated rewards; and
therefore we order you to pay regularly so many solidi of the third
instalment, from the land-tax of the Province of Campania[790], to
such and such a person, who has now just completed his term of service
as Primiscrinius.'

[Footnote 790: 'Ex canone provinciae Campaniae tertiae illationis tot
solidos solenniter te dare censemus.']

38. SENATOR, PRAETORIAN PRAEFECT, TO JOANNES, CANONICARIUS[791] OF
THUSCIA.

[Footnote 791: Tax-collector.]

[Sidenote: Praises of paper.]

'Rightly did Antiquity ordain that a large store of paper should be
laid in by our Bureaux (Scrinia), that litigants might receive the
decision of the Judge clearly written, without delay, and without
avaricious and impudent charges for the paper which bore it[792].

[Footnote 792: Lydus (De Magistratibus iii. 14) makes a similar
remark, but says that in his time the copying clerks (Exceptarii, or
Exceptores) supplied disgracefully bad paper made of grass, and
charged a fee for doing so.]

'A wonderful product in truth is this wherewith ingenious Memphis has
supplied all the offices in the world. The plants of Nile arise, a
wood without leaves or branches, a harvest of the waters, the fair
tresses of the marshes, plants full of emptiness, spongy, thirsty,
having all their strength in their outer rind, tall and light, the
fairest fruit of a foul inundation.

'Before Paper was discovered, all the sayings of the wise, all the
thoughts of the ancients, were in danger of perishing. Who could write
fluently or pleasantly on the rough bark of trees, though it is from
that practice that we call a book _Liber_? While the scribe was
laboriously cutting his letters on the sordid material, his very
thought grew cold: a rude contrivance assuredly, and only fit for the
beginnings of the world.

'Then was paper discovered, and therewith was eloquence made possible.
Paper, so smooth and so continuous, the snowy entrails of a green
herb; paper which can be spread out to such a vast extent, and yet be
folded up into such a little space; paper, on whose white expanse the
black characters look beautiful; paper which keeps the sweet harvest
of th