es of wisdom....

These men are as ants ever preparing their meat in the summer,
and ingenious bees continually fabricating cells of honey....
And to pay due regard to truth, although they lately at the
eleventh hour have entered the Lord's vineyard ..., they have
added more in this brief hour to the stock of the sacred books
than all the other vine-dressers; following in the footsteps
of Paul, the last to be called but the first in preaching, who
spread the gospel of Christ more widely than all others.

It might have been expected, from the use of the word _library_ in the
Rule of S. Benedict, that a special room assigned to books would have been
one of the primitive component parts of every Benedictine House. This,
however, is not the case. Such a room does usually occur in these Houses,
but it will be found, on examination, that it was added to some previously
existing structure in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Its absence
from the primitive plan brings out two points very clearly: (1) how few
books even a wealthy community could afford to possess for several
centuries after the foundation of the Order; (2) how strictly the Order
adhered to prescribed arrangements in laying out its Houses, for even
those built, or rebuilt, after books had become plentiful, do not admit a
Library as an indispensable item in their ground-plan.

How then did they bestow their books after they had become too numerous to
be kept in the church? The answer to this question is a very curious one,
when we consider what our climate is, and indeed what the climate of the
whole of Europe is, during the winter months. The centre of the monastic
life was the cloister. Brethren were not allowed to congregate in any
other part of the conventual buildings, except when they went into the
frater, or dining-hall, for their meals, or at certain hours in certain
seasons into the warming-house (_calefactorium_). In the cloister
accordingly they kept their books; and there they sat and studied, or
conducted the schooling of the novices and choir-boys in winter and in
summer alike.

Such a locality as this could not have been very favourable to the
preservation of the books themselves. They, however, had a certain amount
of protection which was denied to their readers, for they were shut up in
presses. The word used for these, _armarium_, is the same as that which
was applied by the Romans to their bookcases; and pro