ees, or made their pillows of them upon
Salisbury-plain, tradition is equally silent. Let us therefore
preserve the same prudent silence, and march on at once into the
seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries; in which the learning of Bede,
Alcuin, Erigena, and Alfred, strikes us with no small degree of
amazement. Yet we must not forget that their predecessor THEODORE,
archbishop of Canterbury, was among the earliest book-collectors in
this country; for he brought over from Rome, not only a number of able
professors, but a valuable collection of books.[228] Such, however,
was the scarcity of the book article, that Benedict Biscop (a founder
of the monastery of Weremouth in Northumberland), a short time
after, made not fewer than five journeys to Rome to purchase books,
and other necessary things for his monastery--for one of which books
our immortal Alfred (a very _Helluo Librorum_! as you will presently
learn) gave afterwards as much land as eight ploughs could
labour.[229] We now proceed to BEDE; whose library I conjecture to
have been both copious and curious. What matin and midnight vigils
must this literary phenomenon have patiently sustained! What a full
and variously furnished mind was his! Read the table of contents of
the eight folio volumes of the Cologne edition[230] of his works, as
given by Dr. Henry in the appendix to the fourth volume of his history
of our own country; and judge, however you may wish that the author
had gone less into abstruse and ponderous subjects, whether it was
barely possible to avoid falling upon such themes, considering the
gross ignorance and strong bias of the age? Before this, perhaps, I
ought slightly to have noticed INA, king of the West Saxons, whose
ideas of the comforts of a monastery, and whose partiality to
_handsome book-binding_, we may gather from a curious passage in
Stow's Chronicle or Annals.[231]

[Footnote 227: Julius Caesar tells us that they dared not to
commit their laws to writing. _De Bell. Gall._, lib. vi.,
Sec. xiii.-xviii.]

[Footnote 228: Dr. Henry's _Hist. of Great Britain_, vol.
iv., p. 12, edit. 1800, 8vo. We shall readily forgive
Theodore's singularity of opinions in respect to some cases
of pharmacy, in which he held it to be "dangerous to perform
bleeding on the fourth day of the moon; because both the
light of the moon and the tides of the sea were then upon
the increase."--We shall readily forgive t