the highest degree undesirable. Let us, for
example, go back quite beyond the invention of printing and try
to imagine a man who had read all the rolls destroyed in the
Library of Alexandria by successive burnings. (Some reckon the
number of these MSS at 700,000.) Suppose, further, this man to be
gifted with a memory retentive as Lord Macaulay's. Suppose lastly
that we go to such a man and beg him to repeat to us some chosen
one of the fifty or seventy lost, or partially lost, plays of
Euripides. It is incredible that he could gratify us.

There was, as I have said, a great burning at Alexandria in 47
B.C., when Caesar set the fleet in the harbour on fire to prevent
its falling into the hands of the Egyptians. The flames spread,
and the great library stood but 400 yards from the quayside, with
warehouses full of books yet closer. The last great burning was
perpetrated in A.D. 642. Gibbon quotes the famous sentence of
Omar, the great Mohammedan who gave the order: 'If these writings
of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and
need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and
ought to be destroyed,' and goes on:

The sentence was executed with blind obedience; the
volumes of paper or parchment were distributed to the four
thousand baths of the city; and such was their incredible
multitude that six months were barely sufficient for the
consumption of this precious fuel.... The tale has been
repeatedly transcribed; and every scholar, with pious
indignation, has deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the
learning, the arts, and the genius, of antiquity. For my own
part, I am strongly tempted to deny both the fact and the
consequences.

Of the consequence he writes:

Perhaps the church and seat of the patriarchs might be
enriched with a repository of books: but, if the ponderous
mass of Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed
consumed in the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with
a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of
mankind. I sincerely regret the more valuable libraries,
which have been involved in the ruin of the Roman empire;
but, when I seriously compute the lapse of ages, the waste of
ignorance, and the calamities of war, our treasures, rather
than our losses, are the object of my surprise. Many curious
and interesting facts are buried in oblivion: the three great
historians of Rome have been transmitted