ves, Duke of Nevers, and
by this marriage became niece to the Queen of Navarre.--Ed.

Madam, That great oracle of God, St. John Chrysostom, deplores with
infinite compassion in some part of his works the disaster and calamity
of his century, in which not only was the memory of an infinity of
illustrious persons cut off from among mankind, but, what is more, their
writings, by which the rich conceptions of their souls and the divine
ornaments of their minds were to have been consecrated to posterity, did
not survive them. And certainly with most manifest reason did this good
and holy man address such a complaint to the whole Christian Republic,
touched as he was with just grief for an infinity of thousands of books,
of which some have been lost and buried in eternal forgetfulness by
the negligence of men, others dispersed and destroyed by the cruel
incursions of war, others rotted and spoiled as much by the rigour
of time as by carelessness to collect and preserve them; whereof
the ancient Histories and Annals furnish a sufficient example in the
memorable library of that great King of Egypt, Ptolemy Phila-delphus,
which had been formed with the sweat and blood of so many notable
philosophers, and maintained, ordered, and preserved by the liberality
of that great monarch. And yet in less than a day, by the monstrous and
abominable cruelty of the soldiers of Caesar, when the latter followed
Pompey to Alexandria, it was burned and reduced to ashes. Zonarius,
the ecclesiastical historian, writes that the same happened at
Constantinople in the time of Zeno, when a superb and magnificent
palace, adorned with all sorts of manuscript books, was burnt, to the
eternal regret and insupportable detriment of all those who made a
profession of letters. And without amusing ourselves too curiously
in recounting the destruction among the ancients, we have in our time
experienced a similar loss--of which the memory is so recent that the
wounds thereof still bleed in all parts of Europe--namely, when the
Turks besieged Buda, the capital of Hungary, where the most celebrated
library of the good King Matthias was pillaged, dispersed, and
destroyed; a library which, without sparing any expense, he had enriched
with all the rarest and most excellent books, Greek, Latin, Hebrew,
and Arabic, that he had been able to collect in all the most famous
provinces of the earth.

Again, he who would particularise and closely examine things will fin