edici. He has emissaries who travel all over England, France, and Italy
to secure manuscripts for him; with a book one can obtain anything from
him; the abbot of St. Albans, as a propitiatory offering sends him a
Terence, a Virgil, and a Quinctilian. His bedchamber is so encumbered
with books that one can hardly move in it.[236] Towards the end of his
life, never having had but one passion, he undertook to describe it,
and, retired into his manor of Auckland, he wrote in Latin prose his
"Philobiblon."[237] In this short treatise he defends books, Greek and
Roman antiquity, poetry, too, with touching emotion; he is seized with
indignation when he thinks of the crimes of high treason against
manuscripts, daily committed by pupils who in spring dry flowers in
their books; and of the ingratitude of wicked clerks, who admit into the
library dogs, or falcons, or worse still, a two-legged animal, "bestia
bipedalis," more dangerous "than the basilisk, or aspic," who,
discovering the volumes "insufficiently concealed by the protecting web
of a dead spider," condemns them to be sold, and converted for her own
use into silken hoods and furred gowns.[238] Eve's descendants continue,
thinks the bishop, to wrongfully meddle with the tree of knowledge.

What painful commiseration did he not experience on penetrating into an
ill-kept convent library! "Then we ordered the book-presses, chests, and
bags of the noble monasteries to be opened; and, astonished at beholding
again the light of day, the volumes came out of their sepulchres and
their prolonged sleep.... Some of them, which had ranked among the
daintiest, lay for ever spoilt, in all the horror of decay, covered by
filth left by the rats; they who had once been robed in purple and fine
linen now lay on ashes, covered with a cilice."[239] The worthy bishop
looks upon letters with a religious veneration, worthy of the ancients
themselves; his enthusiasm recalls that of Cicero; no one at the
Renaissance, not even the illustrious Bessarion, has praised old
manuscripts with a more touching fervour, or more nearly attained to the
eloquence of the great Latin orator when he speaks of books in his "Pro
Archia": "Thanks to books," says the prelate, "the dead appear to me as
though they still lived.... Everything decays and falls into dust, by
the force of Time; Saturn is never weary of devouring his children, and
the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, had not God as a
remedy c