The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury
by Richard de Bury
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

"TAKE THOU A BOOK INTO THINE HANDS AS SIMON THE JUST TOOK THE
CHILD JESUS INTO HIS ARMS TO CARRY HIM AND KISS HIM. AND WHEN
THOU HAST FINISHED READING, CLOSE THE BOOK AND GIVE THANKS FOR
EVERY WORD OUT OF THE MOUTH OF GOD; BECAUSE IN THE LORD'S FIELD
THOU HAST FOUND A HIDDEN TREASURE."                     
                 THOMAS A KEMPIS: Doctrinale Juvenum  

PREFACE

The Author of the Book.
Richard de Bury (1281-1345), so called from being born near Bury
St. Edmunds, was the son of Sir Richard Aungerville. He studied
at Oxford; and was subsequently chosen to be tutor to Prince
Edward of Windsor, afterwards Edward III. His loyalty to the
cause of Queen Isabella and the Prince involved him in danger.
On the accession of his pupil he was made successively Cofferer,
Treasurer of the Wardrobe, Archdeacon of Northampton, Prebendary
of Lincoln, Sarum, and Lichfield, Keeper of the Privy Purse,
Ambassador on two occasions to Pope John XXII, who appointed him
a chaplain of the papal chapel, Dean of Wells, and ultimately, at
the end of the year 1333, Bishop of Durham; the King and Queen,
the King of Scots, and all the magnates north of the Trent,
together with a multitude of nobles and many others, were present
at his enthronization. It is noteworthy that during his stay at
Avignon, probably in 1330, he made the acquaintance of Petrarch,
who has left us a brief account of their intercourse. In 1332
Richard visited Cambridge, as one of the King's commissioners, to
inquire into the state of the King's Scholars there, and perhaps
then became a member of the Gild of St. Mary--one of the two
gilds which founded Corpus Christi College.

In 1334 he became High Chancellor of England, and Treasurer in
1336, resigning the former office in 1335, so that he might help
the King in dealing with affairs abroad and in Scotland, and took
a most distinguished part in diplomatic negociations between
England and France. In 1339 he was again in his bishopric.
Thereafter his name occurs often among those appointed to treat
of peace with Philip of France, and with Bruce of Scotland. It
appears that he was not in Parliament in 1344. Wasted by long
sickness--longa infirmitate decoctus--on the 14th of April, 1345,
Richard de Bury died at Auckland, and was buried in Durham
Cathedral.

Dominus Ricardus de Bury migravit ad Dominum.

The Bishop as Booklover.
According to the concluding note, the Philobiblon was completed
on the bishop's fifty-eighth birthday, the 24th of January, 1345,
so that even though weakened by illness, Richard must have been
actively engaged in his literary efforts to the very end of his
generous and noble life. His enthusiastic devoted biographer
Chambre[1] gives a vivid account of the bishop's bookloving
propensities, supplementary to what can be gathered from the
Philobiblon itself. Iste summe delectabatur in multitudine
librorum; he had more books, as was commonly reported, than all
the other English bishops put together. He had a separate
library in each of his residences, and wherever he was residing,
so many books lay about his bed-chamber, that it was hardly
possible to stand or move without treading upon them. All the
time he could spare from business was devoted either to religious
offices or to his books. Every day while at table he would have
a book read to him, unless some special guest were present, and
afterwards would engage in discussion on the subject of the
reading. The haughty Anthony Bec delighted in the appendages of
royalty--to be addressed by nobles kneeling, and to be waited on
in his presence-chamber and at his table by Knights bare-headed
and standing; but De Bury loved to surround himself with learned
scholars. Among these were such men as Thomas Bradwardine,
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, and author of the De Causa
Dei; Richard Fitzralph, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, and
famous for his hostility to the mendicant orders; Walter Burley,
who dedicated to him a translation of the Politics of Aristototle
made at his suggestion; John Mauduit, the astronomer; Robert
Holkot, author of many books; Richard de Kilvington; Richard
Benworth, afterwards Bishop of London; and Walter Seagrave, who
became Dean of Chichester."[2]

[1] Cp. Surtees Society's edition of Scriptores Tres; also
Wharton's Anglia Sacra.

[2] An unsuccessful attempt has been made to transfer the
authorship of the book to Robert Holkot. Various theories have
been advanced against Richard's claims. It is noteworthy that
his contemporary Adam Murimuth disparages him as "mediocriter
literatus, volens tamen magnus clericus reputari," but such
disparagement must be taken with the utmost caution. The really
difficult fact to be accounted for is the omission on the part of
Chambre to mention the book.

The Bishop's Books.
In the Philobiblon, Richard de Bury frankly and clearly describes
his means and method of collecting books. Anyhow his object was
clearly not selfish. The treatise contains his rules for the
library of the new College at Oxford--Durham College (where
Trinity College now stands)--which he practically founded, though
his successor, Bishop Hatfield, carried the scheme into effect.
It is traditionally reported that Richard's books were sent, in
his lifetime or after his death, to the house of the Durham
Benedictines at Oxford, and there remained until the dissolution
of the College by Henry VIII., when they were dispersed, some
going into Duke Humphrey's (the University) library, others to
Balliol College, and the remainder passing into the hands of Dr.
George Owen, who purchased the site of the dissolved College.[3]

[3] Mr. J. W. Clark puts the matter as follows:--"Durham College,
maintained by the Benedictines of Durham, was supplied with books
from the mother-house, lists of which have been preserved; and
subsequently a library was built there to contain the collection
bequeathed in 1345 by Richard de Bury" (The Care of Books, p.
142). Mr. Thomas points out that De Bury's executors sold at
least some portion of his books; and, moreover, his biographer
says nothing of a library at Oxford. Possibly the scheme was
never carried out. In the British Museum (Roy. 13 D. iv. 3) is a
large folio MS. of the works of John of Salisbury, which was one
of the books bought back from the Bishop's executors.

Unfortunately, the "special catalogue" of his books prepared by
Richard has not come down to us; but "from his own book and from
the books cited in the works of his friends and housemates, who
may reasonably be supposed to have drawn largely from the
bishop's collection, it would be possible to restore a
hypothetical but not improbable Bibliotheca Ricardi de Bury. The
difficulty would be with that contemporary literature, which they
would think below the dignity of quotation, but which we know the
Bishop collected."

Early Editions of the Philobiblon.
The book was first printed at Cologne in 1473, at Spires in 1483,
and at Paris in 1500. The first English edition appeared in
1598-9, edited by Thomas James, Bodley's first librarian. Other
editions appeared in Germany in 1610, 1614, 1674 and 1703; at
Paris in 1856; at Albany in 1861. The texts were, with the
exception of those issued in 1483 and 1599, based on the 1473
edition; though the French edition and translation of 1856,
prepared by M. Cocheris, claimed to be a critical version, it
left the text untouched, and merely gave the various readings of
the three Paris manuscripts at the foot of the pages; these
readings are moreover badly chosen, and the faults of the version
are further to be referred to the use of the ill- printed 1703
edition as copy.

In 1832 there appeared an anonymous English translation, now
known to have been by J. B. Inglis; it followed the edition of
1473, with all its errors and inaccuracies.

Mr. E. C. Thomas' Text.--The first true text of the Philobiblon,
the result of a careful examination of twenty-eight MSS., and of
the various printed editions, appeared in the year 1888:

"The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, Treasurer
and Chancellor of Edward III, edited and translated by Ernest C.
Thomas, Barrister- at-law, late Scholar of Trinity College,
Oxford, and Librarian of the Oxford Union. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, & Co."

For fifteen years the enthusiastic editor--an ideal
Bibliophile--had toiled at his labour of love, and his work was
on all sides received with the recognition due to his monumental
achievement. To the great loss of English learning, he did not
long survive the conclusion of his labours. The very limited
edition of the work was soon exhausted, and it is by the most
generous permission of his father, Mr. John Thomas, of Lower
Broughton, Manchester, that the translation--the only trustworthy
rendering of Richard de Bury's precious treatise--is now, for the
first time, made accessible to the larger book-loving public, and
fittingly inaugurates the present series of English classics.
The general Editor desires to express his best thanks to Mr.
John Thomas, as also to Messrs. Kegan Paul, for their kindness in
allowing him to avail himself of the materials included in the
1888 edition of the work. He has attempted, in the brief Preface
and Notes, to condense Mr. Thomas' labours in such a way as would
have been acceptable to the lamented scholar, and though he has
made bold to explain some few textual difficulties, and to add
some few references, he would fain hope that these additions have
been made with modest caution--with the reverence due to the
unstinted toil of a Bibliophile after Richard de Bury's own
pattern. Yet once again Richard de Bury's Philobiblon, edited
and translated into English by E. C. Thomas, is presented to new
generations of book-lovers:--      "LIBRORUM DILECTORIBUS."

THE PHILOBIBLON NEWLY TRANSLATED                                 
                    

PROLOGUE   
I    That the treasure of wisdom is chiefly contained in books  

II   The degree of affection that is properly due to books   

III  What we are to think of the price in the buying of books  

IV   The complaint of books against the clergy already promoted

V    The complaint of books against the possessioners   

VI   The complaint of books against the mendicants   

VII  The complaint of books against wars   

VIII Of the numerous opportunities we have had of collecting a
store of books   

IX   How, although we preferred the works of the ancients, we
have not condemned the studies of the moderns  

X    Of the gradual perfecting of books  

XI   Why we have preferred books of liberal learning to books of
law  

XII  Why we have caused books of grammar to be so diligently     
prepared   

XIII Why we have not wholly neglected the fables of the poets  

XIV  Who ought to be special lovers of books  

XV   Of the advantages of the love of books   

XVI  That it is meritorious to write new books and to renew the
old  

XVII Of showing due propriety in the custody of books   

XVIII Showeth that we have collected  so great store of books for
the common benefit of scholars and not only for our own pleasure
   
XIX  Of the manner of lending all our books to students
  
XX   An exhortation to scholars to requite us by pious prayers

PROLOGUE

To all the faithful of Christ to whom the tenor of these presents
may come, Richard de Bury, by the divine mercy Bishop of Durham,
wisheth everlasting salvation in the Lord and to present
continually a pious memorial of himself before God, alike in his
lifetime and after his death.

What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits towards
me? asks the most devout Psalmist, an invincible King and first
among the prophets; in which most grateful question he approves
himself a willing thank-offerer, a multifarious debtor, and one
who wishes for a holier counsellor than himself: agreeing with
Aristotle, the chief of philosophers, who shows (in the 3rd and
6th books of his Ethics) that all action depends upon counsel.

And indeed if so wonderful a prophet, having a fore-knowledge of
divine secrets, wished so anxiously to consider how he might
gratefully repay the blessings graciously bestowed, what can we
fitly do, who are but rude thanksgivers and most greedy
receivers, laden with infinite divine benefits? Assuredly we
ought with anxious deliberation and abundant consideration,
having first invoked the Sevenfold Spirit, that it may burn in
our musings as an illuminating fire, fervently to prepare a way
without hinderance, that the bestower of all things may be
cheerfully worshipped in return for the gifts that He has
bestowed, that our neighbour may be relieved of his burden, and
that the guilt contracted by sinners every day may be redeemed by
the atonement of almsgiving.

Forewarned therefore through the admonition of the Psalmist's
devotion by Him who alone prevents and perfects the goodwill of
man, without Whom we have no power even so much as to think, and
Whose gift we doubt not it is, if we have done anything good, we
have diligently inquired and considered in our own heart as well
as with others, what among the good offices of various works of
piety would most please the Almighty, and would be more
beneficial to the Church Militant. And lo! there soon occurred
to our contemplation a host of unhappy, nay, rather of elect
scholars, in whom God the Creator and Nature His handmaid planted
the roots of excellent morals and of famous sciences, but whom
the poverty of their circumstances so oppressed that before the
frown of adverse fortune the seeds of excellence, so fruitful in
the cultivated field of youth, not being watered by the rain that
they require, are forced to wither away. Thus it happens that
"bright virtue lurks buried in obscurity," to use the words of
Boethius, and burning lights are not put under a bushel, but for
want of oil are utterly extinguished. Thus the field, so full of
flower in Spring, has withered up before harvest time; thus wheat
degenerates to tares, and vines into the wild vines, and thus
olives run into the wild olive; the tender stems rot away
altogether, and those who might have grown up into strong pillars
of the Church, being endowed with the capacity of a subtle
intellect, abandon the schools of learning. With poverty only as
their stepmother, they are repelled violently from the nectared
cup of philosophy as soon as they have tasted of it and have
become more fiercely thirsty by the very taste. Though fit for
the liberal arts and disposed to study the sacred writings alone,
being deprived of the aid of their friends, by a kind of apostasy
they return to the mechanical arts solely to gain a livelihood,
to the loss of the Church and the degradation of the whole
clergy. Thus Mother Church conceiving sons is compelled to
miscarry, nay, some misshapen monster is born untimely from her
womb, and for lack of that little with which Nature is contented,
she loses excellent pupils, who might afterwards become champions
and athletes of the faith. Alas, how suddenly the woof is cut,
while the hand of the weaver is beginning his work! Alas, how the
sun is eclipsed in the brightness of the dawn, and the planet in
its course is hurled backwards, and, while it bears the nature
and likeness of a star suddenly drops and becomes a meteor! What
more piteous sight can the pious man behold? What can more
sharply stir the bowels of his pity? What can more easily melt a
heart hard as an anvil into hot tears? On the other hand, let us
recall from past experience how much it has profited the whole
Christian commonwealth, not indeed to enervate students with the
delights of a Sardanapalus or the riches of a Croesus, but rather
to support them in their poverty with the frugal means that
become the scholar. How many have we seen with our eyes, how
many have we read of in books, who, distinguished by no pride of
birth, and rejoicing in no rich inheritance, but supported only
by the piety of the good, have made their way to apostolic
chairs, have most worthily presided over faithful subjects, have
bent the necks of the proud and lofty to the ecclesiastical yoke
and have extended further the liberties of the Church!

Accordingly, having taken a survey of human necessities in every
direction, with a view to bestow our charity upon them, our
compassionate inclinations have chosen to bear pious aid to this
calamitous class of men, in whom there is nevertheless such hope
of advantage to the Church, and to provide for them, not only in
respect of things necessary to their support, but much more in
respect of the books so useful to their studies. To this end,
most acceptable in the sight of God, our attention has long been
unweariedly devoted. This ecstatic love has carried us away so
powerfully, that we have resigned all thoughts of other earthly
things, and have given ourselves up to a passion for acquiring
books. That our intent and purpose, therefore, may be known to
posterity as well as to our contemporaries, and that we may for
ever stop the perverse tongues of gossipers as far as we are
concerned, we have published a little treatise written in the
lightest style of the moderns; for it is ridiculous to find a
slight matter treated of in a pompous style. And this treatise
(divided into twenty chapters) will clear the love we have had
for books from the charge of excess, will expound the purpose of
our intense devotion, and will narrate more clearly than light
all the circumstances of our undertaking. And because it
principally treats of the love of books, we have chosen, after
the fashion of the ancient Romans, fondly to name it by a Greek
word, Philobiblon.

CHAPTER I

THAT THE TREASURE OF WISDOM IS CHIEFLY CONTAINED IN BOOKS

The desirable treasure of wisdom and science, which all men
desire by an instinct of nature, infinitely surpasses all the
riches of the world; in respect of which precious stones are
worthless; in comparison with which silver is as clay and pure
gold is as a little sand; at whose splendour the sun and moon are
dark to look upon; compared with whose marvellous sweetness honey
and manna are bitter to the taste. O value of wisdom that fadeth
not away with time, virtue ever flourishing, that cleanseth its
possessor from all venom! O heavenly gift of the divine bounty,
descending from the Father of lights, that thou mayest exalt the
rational soul to the very heavens! Thou art the celestial
nourishment of the intellect, which those who eat shall still
hunger and those who drink shall still thirst, and the gladdening
harmony of the languishing soul which he that hears shall never
be confounded. Thou art the moderator and rule of morals, which
he who follows shall not sin. By thee kings reign and princes
decree justice. By thee, rid of their native rudeness, their
minds and tongues being polished, the thorns of vice being torn
up by the roots, those men attain high places of honour, and
become fathers of their country, and companions of princes, who
without thee would have melted their spears into pruning-hooks
and ploughshares, or would perhaps be feeding swine with the
prodigal.

Where dost thou chiefly lie hidden, O most elect treasure! and
where shall thirsting souls discover thee?

Certes, thou hast placed thy tabernacle in books, where the Most
High, the Light of lights, the Book of Life, has established
thee. There everyone who asks receiveth thee, and everyone who
seeks finds thee, and to everyone that knocketh boldly it is
speedily opened. Therein the cherubim spread out their wings,
that the intellect of the students may ascend and look from pole
to pole, from the east and west, from the north and from the
south. Therein the mighty and incomprehensible God Himself is
apprehensibly contained and worshipped; therein is revealed the
nature of things celestial, terrestrial, and infernal; therein
are discerned the laws by which every state is administered, the
offices of the celestial hierarchy are distinguished, and the
tyrannies of demons described, such as neither the ideas of Plato
transcend, nor the chair of Crato contained.

In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I
foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth;
from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are
corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the
children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be
buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the
remedy of books.

Alexander, the conqueror of the earth, Julius, the invader of
Rome and of the world, who, the first in war and arts, assumed
universal empire under his single rule, faithful Fabricius and
stern Cato, would now have been unknown to fame, if the aid of
books had been wanting. Towers have been razed to the ground;
cities have been overthrown; triumphal arches have perished from
decay; nor can either pope or king find any means of more easily
conferring the privilege of perpetuity than by books. The book
that he has made renders its author this service in return, that
so long as the book survives its author remains immortal and
cannot die, as Ptolemy declares in the Prologue to his Almagest:
He is not dead, he says, who has given life to science.

Who therefore will limit by anything of another kind the price of
the infinite treasure of books, from which the scribe who is
instructed bringeth forth things new and old? Truth that
triumphs over all things, which overcomes the king, wine, and
women, which it is reckoned holy to honour before friendship,
which is the way without turning and the life without end, which
holy Boethius considers to be threefold in thought, speech, and
writing, seems to remain more usefully and to fructify to greater
profit in books. For the meaning of the voice perishes with the
sound; truth latent in the mind is wisdom that is hid and
treasure that is not seen; but truth which shines forth in books
desires to manifest itself to every impressionable sense. It
commends itself to the sight when it is read, to the hearing when
it is heard, and moreover in a manner to the touch, when it
suffers itself to be transcribed, bound, corrected, and
preserved.  The undisclosed truth of the mind, although it is
the possession of the noble soul, yet because it lacks a
companion, is not certainly known to be delightful, while neither
sight nor hearing takes account of it. Further the truth of the
voice is patent only to the ear and eludes the sight, which
reveals to us more of the qualities of things, and linked with
the subtlest of motions begins and perishes as it were in a
breath. But the written truth of books, not transient but
permanent, plainly offers itself to be observed, and by means of
the pervious spherules of the eyes, passing through the vestibule
of perception and the courts of imagination, enters the chamber
of intellect, taking its place in the couch of memory, where it
engenders the eternal truth of the mind.

Finally we must consider what pleasantness of teaching there is
in books, how easy, how secret! How safely we lay bare the
poverty of human ignorance to books without feeling any shame!
They are masters who instruct us without rod or ferule, without
angry words, without clothes or money. If you come to them they
are not asleep; if you ask and inquire of them they do not
withdraw themselves; they do not chide if you make mistakes; they
do not laugh at you if you are ignorant. O books, who alone are
liberal and free, who give to all who ask of you and enfranchise
all who serve you faithfully! By how many thousand types are ye
commended to learned men in the Scriptures given us by
inspiration of God! For ye are the minds of profoundest wisdom,
to which the wise man sends his son that he may dig out
treasures: Prov. ii. Ye are the wells of living waters, which
father Abraham first digged, Isaac digged again, and which the
Philistines strive to fill up: Gen. xxvi. Ye are indeed the most
delightful ears of corn, full of grain, to be rubbed only by
apostolic hands, that the sweetest food may be produced for
hungry souls: Matt. xii. Ye are the golden pots in which manna
is stored, and rocks flowing with honey, nay, combs of honey,
most plenteous udders of the milk of life, garners ever full; ye
are the tree of life and the fourfold river of Paradise, by which
the human mind is nourished, and the thirsty intellect is watered
and refreshed. Ye are the ark of Noah and the ladder of Jacob,
and the troughs by which the young of those who look therein are
coloured; ye are the stones of testimony and the pitchers holding
the lamps of Gideon, the scrip of David, from which the smoothest
stones are taken for the slaying of Goliath. Ye are the golden
vessels of the temple, the arms of the soldiers of the Church
with which to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked, fruitful
olives, vines of Engadi, fig-trees that are never barren, burning
lamps always to be held in readiness--and all the noblest
comparisons of Scripture may be applied to books, if we choose to
speak in figures.

CHAPTER II

THE DEGREE OF AFFECTION THAT IS PROPERLY DUE TO BOOKS

Since the degree of affection a thing deserves depends upon the
degree of its value, and the previous chapter shows that the
value of books is unspeakable, it is quite clear to the reader
what is the probable conclusion from this. I say probable, for
in moral science we do not insist upon demonstration, remembering
that the educated man seeks such degree of certainty as he
perceives the subject-matter will bear, as Aristotle testifies in
the first book of his Ethics. For Tully does not appeal to
Euclid, nor does Euclid rely upon Tully. This at all events we
endeavour to prove, whether by logic or rhetoric, that all riches
and all delights whatsoever yield place to books in the spiritual
mind, wherein the Spirit which is charity ordereth charity. Now
in the first place, because wisdom is contained in books more
than all mortals understand, and wisdom thinks lightly of riches,
as the foregoing chapter declares. Furthermore, Aristotle, in
his Problems, determines the question, why the ancients proposed
prizes to the stronger in gymnastic and corporeal contests, but
never awarded any prize for wisdom. This question he solves as
follows: In gymnastic exercises the prize is better and more
desirable than that for which it is bestowed; but it is certain
that nothing is better than wisdom: wherefore no prize could be
assigned for wisdom. And therefore neither riches nor delights
are more excellent than wisdom. Again, only the fool will deny
that friendship is to be preferred to riches, since the wisest of
men testifies this; but the chief of philosophers honours truth
before friendship, and the truthful Zorobabel prefers it to all
things. Riches, then, are less than truth. Now truth is chiefly
maintained and contained in holy books--nay, they are written
truth itself, since by books we do not now mean the materials of
which they are made. Wherefore riches are less than books,
especially as the most precious of all riches are friends, as
Boethius testifies in the second book of his Consolation; to whom
the truth of books according to Aristotle is to be preferred.
Moreover, since we know that riches first and chiefly appertain
to the support of the body only, while the virtue of books is the
perfection of reason, which is properly speaking the happiness of
man, it appears that books to the man who uses his reason are
dearer than riches. Furthermore, that by which the faith is more
easily defended, more widely spread, more clearly preached, ought
to be more desirable to the faithful. But this is the truth
written in books, which our Saviour plainly showed, when he was
about to contend stoutly against the Tempter, girding himself
with the shield of truth and indeed of written truth, declaring
"it is written" of what he was about to utter with his voice.

And, again, no one doubts that happiness is to be preferred to
riches. But happiness consists in the operation of the noblest
and diviner of the faculties that we possess--when the whole mind
is occupied in contemplating the truth of wisdom, which is the
most delectable of all our virtuous activities, as the prince of
philosophers declares in the tenth book of the Ethics, on which
account it is that philosophy is held to have wondrous pleasures
in respect of purity and solidity, as he goes on to say. But the
contemplation of truth is never more perfect than in books, where
the act of imagination perpetuated by books does not suffer the
operation of the intellect upon the truths that it has seen to
suffer interruption. Wherefore books appear to be the most
immediate instruments of speculative delight, and therefore
Aristotle, the sun of philosophic truth, in considering the
principles of choice, teaches that in itself to philosophize is
more desirable than to be rich, although in certain cases, as
where for instance one is in need of necessaries, it may be more
desirable to be rich than to philosophize.

Moreover, since books are the aptest teachers, as the previous
chapter assumes, it is fitting to bestow on them the honour and
the affection that we owe to our teachers. In fine, since all
men naturally desire to know, and since by means of books we can
attain the knowledge of the ancients, which is to be desired
beyond all riches, what man living according to nature would not
feel the desire of books? And although we know that swine
trample pearls under foot, the wise man will not therefore be
deterred from gathering the pearls that lie before him. A
library of wisdom, then, is more precious than all wealth, and
all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever
therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom
or knowledge, aye, even of the faith, must needs become a lover
of books.

CHAPTER III

WHAT WE ARE TO THINK OF THE PRICE IN THE BUYING OF BOOKS

From what has been said we draw this corollary welcome to us, but
(as we believe) acceptable to few: namely, that no dearness of
price ought to hinder a man from the buying of books, if he has
the money that is demanded for them, unless it be to withstand
the malice of the seller or to await a more favourable
opportunity of buying. For if it is wisdom only that makes the
price of books, which is an infinite treasure to mankind, and if
the value of books is unspeakable, as the premises show, how
shall the bargain be shown to be dear where an infinite good is
being bought? Wherefore, that books are to be gladly bought and
unwillingly sold, Solomon, the sun of men, exhorts us in the
Proverbs: Buy the truth, he says, and sell not wisdom. But what
we are trying to show by rhetoric or logic, let us prove by
examples from history. The arch-philosopher Aristotle, whom
Averroes regards as the law of Nature, bought a few books of
Speusippus straightway after his death for 72,000 sesterces.
Plato, before him in time, but after him in learning, bought the
book of Philolaus the Pythagorean, from which he is said to have
taken the Timaeus, for 10,000 denaries, as Aulus Gellius relates
in the Noctes Atticae. Now Aulus Gellius relates this that the
foolish may consider how wise men despise money in comparison
with books. And on the other hand, that we may know that folly
and pride go together, let us here relate the folly of Tarquin
the Proud in despising books, as also related by Aulus Gellius.
An old woman, utterly unknown, is said to have come to Tarquin
the Proud, the seventh king of Rome, offering to sell nine books,
in which (as she declared) sacred oracles were contained, but she
asked an immense sum for them, insomuch that the king said she
was mad. In anger she flung three books into the fire, and still
asked the same sum for the rest. When the king refused it, again
she flung three others into the fire and still asked the same
price for the three that were left. At last, astonished beyond
measure, Tarquin was glad to pay for three books the same price
for which he might have bought nine. The old woman straightway
disappeared, and was never seen before or after. These were the
Sibylline books, which the Romans consulted as a divine oracle by
some one of the Quindecemvirs, and this is believed to have been
the origin of the Quindecemvirate. What did this Sibyl teach the
proud king by this bold deed, except that the vessels of wisdom,
holy books, exceed all human estimation; and, as Gregory says of
the kingdom of Heaven: They are worth all that thou hast?

CHAPTER IV

THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST THE CLERGY ALREADY PROMOTED

A generation of vipers destroying their own parent and base
offspring of the ungrateful cuckoo, who when he has grown strong
slays his nurse, the giver of his strength, are degenerate clerks
with regard to books. Bring it again to mind and consider
faithfully what ye receive through books, and ye will find that
books are as it were the creators of your distinction, without
which other favourers would have been wanting.

In sooth, while still untrained and helpless ye crept up to us,
ye spake as children, ye thought as children, ye cried as
children and begged to be made partakers of our milk. But we
being straightway moved by your tears gave you the breast of
grammar to suck, which ye plied continually with teeth and
tongue, until ye lost your native barbarousness and learned to
speak with our tongues the mighty things of God. And next we
clad you with the goodly garments of philosophy, rhetoric and
dialectic, of which we had and have a store, while ye were naked
as a tablet to be painted on. For all the household of
philosophy are clothed with garments, that the nakedness and
rawness of the intellect may be covered. After this, providing
you with the fourfold wings of the quadrivials that ye might be
winged like the seraphs and so mount above the cherubim, we sent
you to a friend at whose door, if only ye importunately knocked,
ye might borrow the three loaves of the Knowledge of the Trinity,
in which consists the final felicity of every sojourner below.
Nay, if ye deny that ye had these privileges, we boldly declare
that ye either lost them by your carelessness, or that through
your sloth ye spurned them when offered to you. If these things
seem but a light matter to you, we will add yet greater things.
Ye are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy race, ye are a
peculiar people chosen into the lot of God, ye are priests and
ministers of God, nay, ye are called the very Church of God, as
though the laity were not to be called churchmen. Ye, being
preferred to the laity, sing psalms and hymns in the chancel,
and, serving the altar and living by the altar, make the true
body of Christ, wherein God Himself has honoured you not only
above the laity, but even a little higher than the angels. For
to whom of His angels has He said at any time: Thou art a priest
for ever after the order of Melchisedech? Ye dispense the
patrimony of the crucified one to the poor, wherein it is
required of stewards that a man be found faithful. Ye are
shepherds of the Lord's flock, as well in example of life as in
the word of doctrine, which is bound to repay you with milk and
wool.

Who are the givers of all these things, O clerks? Is it not
books? Do ye remember therefore, we pray, how many and how great
liberties and privileges are bestowed upon the clergy through us?
In truth, taught by us who are the vessels of wisdom and
intellect, ye ascend the teacher's chair and are called of men
Rabbi. By us ye become marvellous in the eyes of the laity, like
great lights in the world, and possess the dignities of the
Church according to your various stations. By us, while ye still
lack the first down upon your cheeks, ye are established in your
early years and bear the tonsure on your heads, while the dread
sentence of the Church is heard: Touch not mine anointed and do
my prophets no harm, and he who has rashly touched them let him
forthwith by his own blow be smitten violently with the wound of
an anathema. At length yielding your lives to wickedness,
reaching the two paths of Pythagoras, ye choose the left branch,
and going backward ye let go the lot of God which ye had first
assumed, becoming companions of thieves. And thus ever going
from bad to worse, dyed with theft and murder and manifold
impurities, your fame and conscience stained by sins, at the
bidding of justice ye are confined in manacles and fetters, and
are kept to be punished by a most shameful death. Then your
friend is put far away, nor is there any to mourn your lot.
Peter swears that he knows not the man: the people cry to the
judge: Crucify, crucify Him! If thou let this man go, thou act
not Caesar's friend. Now all refuge has perished, for ye must
stand before the judgment-seat, and there is no appeal, but only
hanging is in store for you. While the wretched man's heart is
thus filled with woe and only the sorrowing Muses bedew their
cheeks with tears, in his strait is heard on every side the
wailing appeal to us, and to avoid the danger of impending death
he shows the slight sign of the ancient tonsure which we bestowed
upon him, begging that we may be called to his aid and bear
witness to the privilege bestowed upon him. Then straightway
touched with pity we run to meet the prodigal son and snatch the
fugitive slave from the gates of death. The book he has not
forgotten is handed to him to be read, and while with lips
stammering with fear he reads a few words, the power of the judge
is loosed, the accuser is withdrawn, and death is put to flight.
O marvellous virtue of an empiric verse! O saving antidote of
dreadful ruin! O precious reading of the psalter, which for this
alone deserves to be called the book of life! Let the laity
undergo the judgment of the secular arm, that either sewn up in
sacks they may be carried out to Neptune, or planted in the earth
may fructify for Pluto, or may be offered amid the flames as a
fattened holocaust to Vulcan, or at least may be hung up as a
victim to Juno: while our nursling at a single reading of the
book of life is handed over to the custody of the Bishop, and
rigour is changed to favour, and the forum being transferred from
the laity, death is routed by the clerk who is the nursling of
books.

But now let us speak of the clerks who are vessels of virtue.
Which of you about to preach ascends the pulpit or the rostrum
without in some way consulting us? Which of you enters the
schools to teach or to dispute without relying upon our support?
First of all, it behoves you to eat the book with Ezechiel, that
the belly of your memory may be sweetened within, and thus as
with the panther refreshed, to whose breath all beasts and cattle
long to approach, the sweet savour of the spices it has eaten may
shed a perfume without. Thus our nature secretly working in our
own, listeners hasten up gladly, as the load-stone draws the iron
nothing loth. What an infinite host of books lie at Paris or
Athens, and at the same time resound in Britain and in Rome! In
truth, while resting they yet move, and while retaining their own
places they are carried about every way to the minds of
listeners. Finally, by the knowledge of literature, we establish
Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and the Pope, that all things in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy may be fitly disposed. For it is from
books that everything of good that befalls the clerical condition
takes its origin. But let this suffice: for it pains us to
recall what we have bestowed upon the degenerate clergy, because
whatever gifts are distributed to the ungrateful seem to be lost
rather than bestowed.

Let us next dwell a little on the recital of the wrongs with
which they requite us, the contempts and cruelties of which we
cannot recite an example in each kind, nay, scarcely the main
classes of the several wrongs. In the first place, we are
expelled by force and arms from the homes of the clergy, which
are ours by hereditary right, who were used to have cells of
quietness in the inner chamber, but, alas! in these unhappy times
we are altogether exiled, suffering poverty without the gates.
For our places are seized now by dogs, now by hawks, now by that
biped beast whose cohabitation with the clergy was forbidden of
old, from which we have always taught our nurslings to flee more
than from the asp and the cockatrice; wherefore she, always
jealous of the love of us, and never to be appeased, at length
seeing us in some corner protected only by the web of some dead
spider, with a frown abuses and reviles us with bitter words,
declaring us alone of all the furniture in the house to be
unnecessary, and complaining that we are useless for any
household purpose, and advises that we should speedily be
converted into rich caps, sendal and silk and twice-dyed purple,
robes and furs, wool and linen: and, indeed, not without reason,
if she could see our inmost hearts, if she had listened to our
secret counsels, if she had read the book of Theophrastus or
Valerius, or only heard the twenty-fifth chapter of
Ecclesiasticus with understanding ears.

And hence it is that we have to mourn for the homes of which we
have been unjustly robbed; and as to our coverings, not that they
have not been given to us, but that the coverings anciently given
to us have been torn by violent hands, insomuch that our soul is
bowed down to the dust, our belly cleaveth unto the earth. We
suffer from various diseases, enduring pains in our backs and
sides; we lie with our limbs unstrung by palsy, and there is no
man who layeth it to heart, and no man who provides a mollifying
plaster. Our native whiteness that was clear with light has
turned to dun and yellow, so that no leech who should see us
would doubt that we are diseased with jaundice. Some of us are
suffering from gout, as our twisted extremities plainly show.
The smoke and dust by which we are continuously plagued have
dulled the keenness of our visual rays, and are now infecting our
bleared eyes with ophthalmia. Within we are devoured by the
fierce gripings of our entrails, which hungry worms cease not to
gnaw, and we undergo the corruption of the two Lazaruses, nor is
there anyone to anoint us with balm of cedar, nor to cry to us
who have been four days dead and already stink, Lazarus come
forth! No healing drug is bound around our cruel wounds, which
are so atrociously inflicted upon the innocent, and there is none
to put a plaster upon our ulcers; but ragged and shivering we are
flung away into dark corners, or in tears take our place with
holy Job upon his dunghill, or--too horrible to relate--are
buried in the depths of the common sewers. The cushion is
withdrawn that should support our evangelical sides, which ought
to have the first claim upon the incomes of the clergy, and the
common necessaries of life thus be for ever provided for us, who
are entrusted to their charge.

Again, we complain of another sort of injury which is too often
unjustly inflicted upon our persons. We are sold for bondmen and
bondwomen, and lie as hostages in taverns with no one to redeem
us. We fall a prey to the cruel shambles, where we see sheep and
cattle slaughtered not without pious tears, and where we die a
thousand times from such terrors as might frighten even the
brave. We are handed over to Jews, Saracens, heretics and
infidels, whose poison we always dread above everything, and by
whom it is well known that some of our parents have been infected
with pestiferous venom. In sooth, we who should be treated as
masters in the sciences, and bear rule over the mechanics who
should be subject to us, are instead handed over to the
government of subordinates, as though some supremely noble
monarch should be trodden under foot by rustic heels. Any
seamster or cobbler or tailor or artificer of any trade keeps us
shut up in prison for the luxurious and wanton pleasures of the
clergy.

Now we would pursue a new kind of injury by which we suffer alike
in person and in fame, the dearest thing we have. Our purity of
race is diminished every day, while new authors' names are
imposed upon us by worthless compilers, translators, and
transformers, and losing our ancient nobility, while we are
reborn in successive generations, we become wholly degenerate;
and thus against our will the name of some wretched stepfather is
affixed to us, and the sons are robbed of the names of their true
fathers. The verses of Virgil, while he was yet living, were
claimed by an impostor; and a certain Fidentinus mendaciously
usurped the works of Martial, whom Martial thus deservedly
rebuked:

     "The book you read is, Fidentinus! mine,      
Though read so badly, 't well may pass for thine!"

What marvel, then, if when our authors are dead clerical apes use
us to make broad their phylacteries, since even while they are
alive they try to seize us as soon as we are published? Ah! how
often ye pretend that we who are ancient are but lately born, and
try to pass us off as sons who are really fathers, calling us who
have made you clerks the production of your studies. Indeed, we
derived our origin from Athens, though we are now supposed to be
from Rome; for Carmentis was always the pilferer of Cadmus, and
we who were but lately born in England, will to-morrow be born
again in Paris; and thence being carried to Bologna, will obtain
an Italian origin, based upon no affinity of blood. Alas! how ye
commit us to treacherous copyists to be written, how corruptly ye
read us and kill us by medication, while ye supposed ye were
correcting us with pious zeal. Oftentimes we have to endure
barbarous interpreters, and those who are ignorant of foreign
idioms presume to translate us from one language into another;
and thus all propriety of speech is lost and our sense is
shamefully mutilated contrary to the meaning of the author!
Truly noble would have been the condition of books if it had not
been for the presumption of the tower of Babel, if but one kind
of speech had been transmitted by the whole human race.

We will add the last clause of our long lament, though far too
short for the materials that we have. For in us the natural use
is changed to that which is against nature, while we who are the
light of faithful souls everywhere fall a prey to painters
knowing nought of letters, and are entrusted to goldsmiths to
become, as though we were not sacred vessels of wisdom,
repositories of gold-leaf. We fall undeservedly into the power
of laymen, which is more bitter to us than any death, since they
have sold our people for nought, and our enemies themselves are
our judges.

It is clear from what we have said what infinite invectives we
could hurl against the clergy, if we did not think of our own
reputation. For the soldier whose campaigns are over venerates
his shield and arms, and grateful Corydon shows regard for his
decaying team, harrow, flail and mattock, and every manual
artificer for the instruments of his craft; it is only the
ungrateful cleric who despises and neglects those things which
have ever been the foundation of his honours.

CHAPTER V

THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST THE POSSESSIONERS

The venerable devotion of the religious orders is wont to be
solicitous in the care of books and to delight in their society,
as if they were the only riches. For some used to write them
with their own hands between the hours of prayer, and gave to the
making of books such intervals as they could secure and the times
appointed for the recreation of the body. By whose labours there
are resplendent to-day in most monasteries these sacred
treasuries full of cherubic letters, for giving the knowledge of
salvation to the student and a delectable light to the paths of
the laity. O manual toil, happier than any agricultural task! O
devout solicitude, where neither Martha nor Mary deserves to be
rebuked! O joyful house, in which the fruitful Leah does not
envy the beauteous Rachel, but action and contemplation share
each other's joys! O happy charge, destined to benefit endless
generations of posterity, with which no planting of trees, no
sowing of seeds, no pastoral delight in herds, no building of
fortified camps can be compared! Wherefore the memory of those
fathers should be immortal, who delighted only in the treasures
of wisdom, who most laboriously provided shining lamps against
future darkness, and against hunger of hearing the Word of God,
most carefully prepared, not bread baked in the ashes, nor of
barley, nor musty, but unleavened loaves made of the finest wheat
of divine wisdom, with which hungry souls might be joyfully fed
These men were the stoutest champions of the Christian army, who
defended our weakness by their most valiant arms; they were in
their time the most cunning takers of foxes, who have left us
their nets, that we might catch the young foxes, who cease not to
devour the growing vines. Of a truth, noble fathers, worthy of
perpetual benediction, ye would have been deservedly happy, if ye
had been allowed to beget offspring like yourselves, and to leave
no degenerate or doubtful progeny for the benefit of future
times.

But, painful to relate, now slothful Thersites handles the arms
of Achilles and the choice trappings of war-horses are spread
upon lazy asses, winking owls lord it in the eagle's nest, and
the cowardly kite sits upon the perch of the hawk.

Liber Bacchus is ever loved,  
And is into their bellies shoved,      
By day and by night;  
Liber Codex is neglected,  
And with scornful hand rejected      
Far out of their sight.

And as if the simple monastic folk of modern times were deceived
by a confusion of names, while Liber Pater is preferred to Liber
Patrum, the study of the monks nowadays is in the emptying of
cups and not the emending of books; to which they do not hesitate
to add the wanton music of Timotheus, jealous of chastity, and
thus the song of the merry-maker and not the chant of the mourner
is become the office of the monks. Flocks and fleeces, crops and
granaries, leeks and potherbs, drink and goblets, are nowadays
the reading and study of the monks, except a few elect ones, in
whom lingers not the image but some slight vestige of the fathers
that preceded them. And again, no materials at all are furnished
us to commend the canons regular for their care or study of us,
who though they bear their name of honour from their twofold
rule, yet have neglected the notable clause of Augustine's rule,
in which we are commended to his clergy in these words: Let
books be asked for each day at a given hour; he who asks for them
after the hour is not to receive them. Scarcely anyone observes
this devout rule of study after saying the prayers of the Church,
but to care for the things of this world and to look at the
plough that has been left is reckoned the highest wisdom. They
take up bow and quiver, embrace arms and shield, devote the
tribute of alms to dogs and not to the poor, become the slaves of
dice and draughts, and of all such things as we are wont to
forbid even to the secular clergy, so that we need not marvel if
they disdain to look upon us, whom they see so much opposed to
their mode of life.

Come then, reverend fathers, deign to recall your fathers and
devote yourselves more faithfully to the study of holy books,
without which all religion will stagger, without which the virtue
of devotion will dry up like a sherd, and without which ye can
afford no light to the world.

CHAPTER VI

THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST THE MENDICANTS

Poor in spirit, but most rich in faith, off-scourings of the
world and salt of the earth, despisers of the world and fishers
of men, how happy are ye, if suffering penury for Christ ye know
how to possess your souls in patience! For it is not want the
avenger of iniquity, nor the adverse fortune of your parents, nor
violent necessity that has thus oppressed you with beggary, but a
devout will and Christ-like election, by which ye have chosen
that life as the best, which God Almighty made man as well by
word as by example declared to be the best. In truth, ye are the
latest offspring of the ever-fruitful Church, of late divinely
substituted for the Fathers and the Prophets, that your sound may
go forth into all the earth, and that instructed by our healthful
doctrines ye may preach before all kings and nations the
invincible faith of Christ. Moreover, that the faith of the
Fathers is chiefly enshrined in books the second chapter has
sufficiently shown, from which it is clearer than light that ye
ought to be zealous lovers of books above all other Christians.
Ye are commanded to sow upon all waters, because the Most High is
no respecter of persons, nor does the Most Holy desire the death
of sinners, who offered Himself to die for them, but desires to
heal the contrite in heart, to raise the fallen, and to correct
the perverse in the spirit of lenity. For which most salutary
purpose our kindly Mother Church has planted you freely, and
having planted has watered you with favours, and having watered
you has established you with privileges, that ye may be
co-workers with pastors and curates in procuring the salvation of
faithful souls. Wherefore, that the order of Preachers was
principally instituted for the study of the Holy Scriptures and
the salvation of their neighbours, is declared by their
constitutions, so that not only from the rule of Bishop
Augustine, which directs books to be asked for every day, but as
soon as they have read the prologue of the said constitutions
they may know from the very title of the same that they are
pledged to the love of books.

But alas! a threefold care of superfluities, viz., of the
stomach, of dress, and of houses, has seduced these men and
others following their example from the paternal care of books,
and from their study. For, forgetting the providence of the
Saviour (who is declared by the Psalmist to think upon the poor
and needy), they are occupied with the wants of the perishing
body, that their feasts may be splendid and their garments
luxurious, against the rule, and the fabrics of their buildings,
like the battlements of castles, carried to a height incompatible
with poverty. Because of these three things, we books, who have
ever procured their advancement and have granted them to sit
among the powerful and noble, are put far from their heart's
affection and are reckoned as superfluities; except that they
rely upon some treatises of small value, from which they derive
strange heresies and apocryphal imbecilities, not for the
refreshment of souls, but rather for tickling the ears of the
listeners. The Holy Scripture is not expounded, but is neglected
and treated as though it were commonplace and known to all,
though very few have touched its hem, and though its depth is
such, as Holy Augustine declares, that it cannot be understood by
the human intellect, however long it may toil with the utmost
intensity of study. From this he who devotes himself to it
assiduously, if only He will vouchsafe to open the door who has
established the spirit of piety, may unfold a thousand lessons of
moral teaching, which will flourish with the freshest novelty and
will cherish the intelligence of the listeners with the most
delightful savours. Wherefore the first professors of evangelical
poverty, after some slight homage paid to secular science,
collecting all their force of intellect, devoted themselves to
labours upon the sacred scripture, meditating day and night on
the law of the Lord. And whatever they could steal from their
famishing belly, or intercept from their half-covered body, they
thought it the highest gain to spend in buying or correcting
books. Whose worldly contemporaries observing their devotion and
study bestowed upon them for the edification of the whole Church
the books which they had collected at great expense in the
various parts of the world.

In truth, in these days as ye are engaged with all diligence in
pursuit of gain, it may be reasonably believed, if we speak
according to human notions, that God thinks less upon those whom
He perceives to distrust His promises, putting their hope in
human providence, not considering the raven, nor the lilies, whom
the Most High feeds and arrays. Ye do not think upon Daniel and
the bearer of the mess of boiled pottage, nor recollect Elijah
who was delivered from hunger once in the desert by angels, again
in the torrent by ravens, and again in Sarepta by the widow,
through the divine bounty, which gives to all flesh their meat in
due season. Ye descend (as we fear) by a wretched anticlimax,
distrust of the divine goodness producing reliance upon your own
prudence, and reliance upon your own prudence begetting anxiety
about worldly things, and excessive anxiety about worldly things
taking away the love as well as the study of books; and thus
poverty in these days is abused to the injury of the Word of God,
which ye have chosen only for profit's sake.

With summer fruit, as the people gossip, ye attract boys to
religion, whom when they have taken the vows ye do not instruct
by fear and force, as their age requires, but allow them to
devote themselves to begging expeditions, and suffer them to
spend the time, in which they might be learning, in procuring the
favour of friends, to the annoyance of their parents, the danger
of the boys, and the detriment of the order. And thus no doubt
it happens that those who were not compelled to learn as
unwilling boys, when they grow up presume to teach though utterly
unworthy and unlearned, and a small error in the beginning
becomes a very great one in the end. For there grows up among
your promiscuous flock of laity a pestilent multitude of
creatures, who nevertheless the more shamelessly force themselves
into the office of preaching, the less they understand what they
are saying, to the contempt of the Divine Word and the injury of
souls. In truth, against the law ye plough with an ox and an ass
together, in committing the cultivation of the Lord's field to
learned and unlearned. Side by side, it is written, the oxen
were ploughing and the asses feeding beside them: since it is the
duty of the discreet to preach, but of the simple to feed
themselves in silence by the hearing of sacred eloquence. How
many stones ye fling upon the heap of Mercury nowadays! How many
marriages ye procure for the eunuchs of wisdom! How many blind
watchmen ye bid go round about the walls of the Church!

O idle fishermen, using only the nets of others, which when torn
it is all ye can do to clumsily repair, but can net no new ones
of your own! ye enter on the labours of others, ye repeat the
lessons of others, ye mouth with theatric effort the
superficially repeated wisdom of others. As the silly parrot
imitates the words that he has heard, so such men are mere
reciters of all, but authors of nothing, imitating Balaam's ass,
which, though senseless of itself, yet became eloquent of speech
and the teacher of its master though a prophet. Recover
yourselves, O poor in Christ, and studiously regard us books,
without which ye can never be properly shod in the preparation of
the Gospel of Peace.

Paul the Apostle, preacher of the truth and excellent teacher of
the nations, for all his gear bade three things to be brought to
him by Timothy, his cloak, books and parchments, affording an
example to ecclesiastics that they should wear dress in
moderation, and should have books for aid in study, and
parchments, which the Apostle especially esteems, for writing:
AND ESPECIALLY, he says, the parchments. And truly that clerk is
crippled and maimed to his disablement in many ways, who is
entirely ignorant of the art of writing. He beats the air with
words and edifies only those who are present, but does nothing
for the absent and for posterity. The man bore a writer's
ink-horn upon his loins, who set a mark Tau upon the foreheads of
the men that sigh and cry, Ezechiel ix.; teaching in a figure
that if any lack skill in writing, he shall not undertake the
task of preaching repentance.

Finally, in conclusion of the present chapter, books implore of
you: make your young men who though ignorant are apt of
intellect apply themselves to study, furnishing them with
necessaries, that ye may teach them not only goodness but
discipline and science, may terrify them by blows, charm them by
blandishments, mollify them by gifts, and urge them on by painful
rigour, so that they may become at once Socratics in morals and
Peripatetics in learning. Yesterday, as it were at the eleventh
hour, the prudent householder introduced you into his vineyard.
Repent of idleness before it is too late: would that with the
cunning steward ye might be ashamed of begging so shamelessly;
for then no doubt ye would devote yourselves more assiduously to
us books and to study.

CHAPTER VII

THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST WARS

Almighty Author and Lover of peace, scatter the nations that
delight in war, which is above all plagues injurious to books.
For wars being without the control of reason make a wild assault
on everything they come across, and, lacking the check of reason
they push on without discretion or distinction to destroy the
vessels of reason. Then the wise Apollo becomes the Python's
prey, and Phronesis, the pious mother, becomes subject to the
power of Phrenzy. Then winged Pegasus is shut up in the stall of
Corydon, and eloquent Mercury is strangled. Then wise Pallas is
struck down by the dagger of error, and the charming Pierides are
smitten by the truculent tyranny of madness. O cruel spectacle!
where you may see the Phoebus of philosophers, the all-wise
Aristotle, whom God Himself made master of the master of the
world, enchained by wicked hands and borne in shameful irons on
the shoulders of gladiators from his sacred home. There you may
see him who was worthy to be lawgiver to the lawgiver of the
world and to hold empire over its emperor, made the slave of vile
buffoons by the most unrighteous laws of war. O most wicked
power of darkness, which does not fear to undo the approved
divinity of Plato, who alone was worthy to submit to the view of
the Creator, before he assuaged the strife of warring chaos, and
before form had put on its garb of matter, the ideal types, in
order to demonstrate the archetypal universe to its author, so
that the world of sense might be modelled after the supernal
pattern. O tearful sight! where the moral Socrates, whose acts
were virtue and whose discourse was science, who deduced
political justice from the principles of nature, is seen enslaved
to some rascal robber. We bemoan Pythagoras, the parent of
harmony, as, brutally scourged by the harrying furies of war, he
utters not a song but the wailings of a dove. We mourn, too, for
Zeno, who lest he should betray his secret bit off his tongue and
fearlessly spat it out at the tyrant, and now, alas! is brayed
and crushed to death in a mortar by Diomedon.

In sooth we cannot mourn with the grief that they deserve all the
various books that have perished by the fate of war in various
parts of the world. Yet we must tearfully recount the dreadful
ruin which was caused in Egypt by the auxiliaries in the
Alexandrian war, when seven hundred thousand volumes were
consumed by fire. These volumes had been collected by the royal
Ptolemies through long periods of time, as Aulus Gellius relates.
What an Atlantean progeny must be supposed to have then perished:
including the motions of the spheres, all the conjunctions of the
planets, the nature of the galaxy, and the prognostic generations
of comets, and all that exists in the heavens or in the ether!
Who would not shudder at such a hapless holocaust, where ink is
offered up instead of blood, where the glowing ashes of crackling
parchment were encarnadined with blood, where the devouring
flames consumed so many thousands of innocents in whose mouth was
no guile, where the unsparing fire turned into stinking ashes so
many shrines of eternal truth! A lesser crime than this is the
sacrifice of Jephthah or Agamemnon, where a pious daughter is
slain by a father's sword. How many labours of the famous
Hercules shall we suppose then perished, who because of his
knowledge of astronomy is said to have sustained the heaven on
his unyielding neck, when Hercules was now for the second time
cast into the flames. The secrets of the heavens, which Jonithus
learnt not from man or through man but received by divine
inspiration; what his brother Zoroaster, the servant of unclean
spirits, taught the Bactrians; what holy Enoch, the prefect of
Paradise, prophesied before he was taken from the world, and
finally, what the first Adam taught his children of the things to
come, which he had seen when caught up in an ecstasy in the book
of eternity, are believed to have perished in those horrid
flames. The religion of the Egyptians, which the book of the
Perfect Word so commends; the excellent polity of the older
Athens, which preceded by nine thousand years the Athens of
Greece; the charms of the Chaldaeans; the observations of the
Arabs and Indians; the ceremonies of the Jews; the architecture
of the Babylonians; the agriculture of Noah the magic arts of
Moses; the geometry of Joshua; the enigmas of Samson; the
problems of Solomon from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop; the
antidotes of Aesculapius; the grammar of Cadmus; the poems of
Parnassus; the oracles of Apollo; the argonautics of Jason; the
stratagems of Palamedes, and infinite other secrets of science
are believed to have perished at the time of this conflagration.

Nay, Aristotle would not have missed the quadrature of the
circle, if only baleful conflicts had spared the books of the
ancients, who knew all the methods of nature. He would not have
left the problem of the eternity of the world an open question,
nor, as is credibly conceived, would he have had any doubts of
the plurality of human intellects and of their eternity, if the
perfect sciences of the ancients had not been exposed to the
calamities of hateful wars. For by wars we are scattered into
foreign lands, are mutilated, wounded, and shamefully disfigured,
are buried under the earth and overwhelmed in the sea, are
devoured by the flames and destroyed by every kind of death. How
much of our blood was shed by warlike Scipio, when he was eagerly
compassing the overthrow of Carthage, the opponent and rival of
the Roman empire! How many thousands of thousands of us did the
ten years' war of Troy dismiss from the light of day! How many
were driven by Anthony, after the murder of Tully, to seek hiding
places in foreign provinces! How many of us were scattered by
Theodoric, while Boethius was in exile, into the different
quarters of the world, like sheep whose shepherd has been struck
down! How many, when Seneca fell a victim to the cruelty of
Nero, and willing yet unwilling passed the gates of death, took
leave of him and retired in tears, not even knowing in what
quarter to seek for shelter!

Happy was that translation of books which Xerxes is said to have
made to Persia from Athens, and which Seleucus brought back again
from Persia to Athens. O glad and joyful return! O wondrous
joy, which you might then see in Athens, when the mother went in
triumph to meet her progeny, and again showed the chambers in
which they had been nursed to her now aging children! Their old
homes were restored to their former inmates, and forthwith boards
of cedar with shelves and beams of gopher wood are most skilfully
planed; inscriptions of gold and ivory are designed for the
several compartments, to which the volumes themselves are
reverently brought and pleasantly arranged, so that no one
hinders the entrance of another or injures its brother by
excessive crowding.

But in truth infinite are the losses which have been inflicted
upon the race of books by wars and tumults. And as it is by no
means possible to enumerate and survey infinity, we will here
finally set up the Gades of our complaint, and turn again to the
prayers with which we began, humbly imploring that the Ruler of
Olympus and the Most High Governor of all the world will
establish peace and dispel wars and make our days tranquil under
His protection.

CHAPTER VIII

OF THE NUMEROUS OPPORTUNITIES WE HAVE HAD OF COLLECTING A STORE
OF BOOKS

Since to everything there is a season and an opportunity, as the
wise Ecclesiastes witnesseth, let us now proceed to relate the
manifold opportunities through which we have been assisted by the
divine goodness in the acquisition of books.

Although from our youth upwards we had always delighted in
holding social commune with learned men and lovers of books, yet
when we prospered in the world and made acquaintance with the
King's majesty and were received into his household, we obtained
ampler facilities for visiting everywhere as we would, and of
hunting as it were certain most choice preserves, libraries
private as well as public, and of the regular as well as of the
secular clergy. And indeed while we filled various offices to
the victorious Prince and splendidly triumphant King of England,
Edward the Third from the Conquest--whose reign may the Almighty
long and peacefully continue--first those about his court, but
then those concerning the public affairs of his kingdom, namely
the offices of Chancellor and Treasurer, there was afforded to
us, in consideration of the royal favour, easy access for the
purpose of freely searching the retreats of books. In fact, the
fame of our love of them had been soon winged abroad everywhere,
and we were reported to burn with such desire for books, and
especially old ones, that it was more easy for any man to gain
our favour by means of books than of money. Wherefore, since
supported by the goodness of the aforesaid prince of worthy
memory, we were able to requite a man well or ill, to benefit or
injure mightily great as well as small, there flowed in, instead
of presents and guerdons, and instead of gifts and jewels, soiled
tracts and battered codices, gladsome alike to our eye and heart.
Then the aumbries of the most famous monasteries were thrown
open, cases were unlocked and caskets were undone, and volumes
that had slumbered through long ages in their tombs wake up and
are astonished, and those that had lain hidden in dark places are
bathed in the ray of unwonted light. These long lifeless books,
once most dainty, but now become corrupt and loathsome, covered
with litters of mice and pierced with the gnawings of the worms,
and who were once clothed in purple and fine linen, now lying in
sackcloth and ashes, given up to oblivion, seemed to have become
habitations of the moth. Natheless among these, seizing the
opportunity, we would sit down with more delight than a
fastidious physician among his stores of gums and spices, and
there we found the object and the stimulus of our affections.
Thus the sacred vessels of learning came into our control and
stewardship; some by gift, others by purchase, and some lent to
us for a season.

No wonder that when people saw that we were contented with gifts
of this kind, they were anxious of their own accord to minister
to our needs with those things that they were more willing to
dispense with than the things they secured by ministering to our
service. And in good will we strove so to forward their affairs
that gain accrued to them, while justice suffered no
disparagement. Indeed, if we had loved gold and silver goblets,
high-bred horses, or no small sums of money, we might in those
days have furnished forth a rich treasury. But in truth we
wanted manuscripts not moneyscripts; we loved codices more than
florins, and preferred slender pamphlets to pampered palfreys.

Besides all this, we were frequently made ambassador of this most
illustrious Prince of everlasting memory, and were sent on the
most various affairs of state, now to the Holy See, now to the
Court of France, and again to various powers of the world, on
tedious embassies and in times of danger, always carrying with
us, however, that love of books which many waters could not
quench. For this like a delicious draught sweetened the
bitterness of our journeyings and after the perplexing
intricacies and troublesome difficulties of causes, and the all
but inextricable labyrinths of public affairs afforded us a
little breathing space to enjoy a balmier atmosphere.

O Holy God of gods in Sion, what a mighty stream of pleasure made
glad our hearts whenever we had leisure to visit Paris, the
Paradise of the world, and to linger there; where the days seemed
ever few for the greatness of our love! There are delightful
libraries, more aromatic than stores of spicery; there are
luxuriant parks of all manner of volumes; there are Academic
meads shaken by the tramp of scholars; there are lounges of
Athens; walks of the Peripatetics; peaks of Parnassus; and
porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts
and sciences Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most
excellent in doctrine, so far as relates to this passing
sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures epicycles and eccentric
apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and numbers;
there Paul reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour Dionysius
arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin
Carmentis reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus
collected in Phoenician letters; there indeed opening our
treasuries and unfastening our purse-strings we scattered money
with joyous heart and purchased inestimable books with mud and
sand. It is naught, it is naught, saith every buyer. But in
vain; for behold how good and how pleasant it is to gather
together the arms of the clerical warfare, that we may have the
means to crush the attacks of heretics, if they arise.

Further, we are aware that we obtained most excellent
opportunities of collecting in the following way. From our early
years we attached to our society with the most exquisite
solicitude and discarding all partiality all such masters and
scholars and professors in the several faculties as had become
most distinguished by their subtlety of mind and the fame of
their learning. Deriving consolation from their sympathetic
conversation, we were delightfully entertained, now by
demonstrative chains of reasoning, now by the recital of physical
processes and the treatises of the doctors of the Church, now by
stimulating discourses on the allegorical meanings of things, as
by a rich and well-varied intellectual feast. Such men we chose
as comrades in our years of learning, as companions in our
chamber, as associates on our journeys, as guests at our table,
and, in short, as helpmates in all the vicissitudes of life. But
as no happiness is permitted to endure for long, we were
sometimes deprived of the bodily companionship of some of these
shining lights, when justice looking down from heaven, the
ecclesiastical preferments and dignities that they deserved fell
to their portion. And thus it happened, as was only right, that
in attending to their own cures they were obliged to absent
themselves from attendance upon us.

We will add yet another very convenient way by which a great
multitude of books old as well as new came into our hands. For
we never regarded with disdain or disgust the poverty of the
mendicant orders, adopted for the sake of Christ; but in all
parts of the world took them into the kindly arms of our
compassion, allured them by the most friendly familiarity into
devotion to ourselves, and having so allured them cherished them
with munificent liberality of beneficence for the sake of God,
becoming benefactors of all of them in general in such wise that
we seemed none the less to have adopted certain individuals with
a special fatherly affection. To these men we were as a refuge
in every case of need, and never refused to them the shelter of
our favour, wherefore we deserved to find them most special
furtherers of our wishes and promoters thereof in act and deed,
who compassing land and sea, traversing the circuit of the world,
and ransacking the universities and high schools of various
provinces, were zealous in combatting for our desires, in the
sure and certain hope of reward. What leveret could escape
amidst so many keen-sighted hunters? What little fish could
evade in turn their hooks and nets and snares? From the body of
the Sacred Law down to the booklet containing the fallacies of
yesterday, nothing could escape these searchers. Was some devout
discourse uttered at the fountain-head of Christian faith, the
holy Roman Curia, or was some strange question ventilated with
novel arguments; did the solidity of Paris, which is now more
zealous in the study of antiquity than in the subtle
investigation of truth, did English subtlety, which illumined by
the lights of former times is always sending forth fresh rays of
truth, produce anything to the advancement of science or the
declaration of the faith, this was instantly poured still fresh
into our ears, ungarbled by any babbler, unmutilated by any
trifler, but passing straight from the purest of wine-presses
into the vats of our memory to be clarified.

But whenever it happened that we turned aside to the cities and
places where the mendicants we have mentioned had their convents,
we did not disdain to visit their libraries and any other
repositories of books; nay, there we found heaped up amid the
utmost poverty the utmost riches of wisdom. We discovered in
their fardels and baskets not only crumbs falling from the
masters' table for the dogs, but the shewbread without leaven and
the bread of angels having in it all that is delicious; and
indeed the garners of Joseph full of corn, and all the spoil of
the Egyptians, and the very precious gifts which Queen Sheba
brought to Solomon.

These men are as ants ever preparing their meat in the summer,
and ingenious bees continually fabricating  cells of honey. They
are successors of Bezaleel in devising all manner of workmanship
in silver and gold and precious stones for decorating the temple
of the Church. They are cunning embroiderers, who fashion the
breastplate and ephod of the high priest and all the various
vestments of the priests. They fashion the curtains of linen and
hair and coverings of ram's skins dyed red with which to adorn
the tabernacle of the Church militant. They are husbandmen that
sow, oxen treading out corn, sounding trumpets, shining Pleiades
and stars remaining in their courses, which cease not to fight
against Sisera. And to pay due regard to truth, without
prejudice to the judgment of any, although they lately at the
eleventh hour have entered the lord's vineyard, as the books that
are so fond of us eagerly declared in our sixth chapter, 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. Of these men, when we were raised to the episcopate we
had several of both orders, viz., the Preachers and Minors, as
personal attendants and companions at our board, men
distinguished no less in letters than in morals, who devoted
themselves with unwearied zeal to the correction, exposition,
tabulation, and compilation of various volumes. But although we
have acquired a very numerous store of ancient as well as modern
works by the manifold intermediation of the religious, yet we
must laud the Preachers with special praise, in that we have
found them above all the religious most freely communicative of
their stores without jealousy, and proved them to be imbued with
an almost Divine liberality, not greedy but fitting possessors of
luminous wisdom.

Besides all the opportunities mentioned above, we secured the
acquaintance of stationers and booksellers, not only within our
own country, but of those spread over the realms of France,
Germany, and Italy, money flying forth in abundance to anticipate
their demands; nor were they hindered by any distance or by the
fury of the seas, or by the lack of means for their expenses,
from sending or bringing to us the books that we required. For
they well knew that their expectations of our bounty would not be
defrauded, but that ample repayment with usury was to be found
with us.

Nor, finally, did our good fellowship, which aimed to captivate
the affection of all, overlook the rectors of schools and the
instructors of rude boys. But rather, when we had an
opportunity, we entered their little plots and gardens and
gathered sweet-smelling flowers from the surface and dug up their
roots, obsolete indeed, but still useful to the student, which
might, when their rank barbarism was digested heal the pectoral
arteries with the gift of eloquence. Amongst the mass of these
things we found some greatly meriting to be restored, which when
skilfully cleansed and freed from the disfiguring rust of age,
deserved to be renovated into comeliness of aspect. And applying
in full measure the necessary means, as a type of the
resurrection to come, we resuscitated them and restored them
again to new life and health.

Moreover, we had always in our different manors no small
multitude of copyists and scribes, of binders, correctors,
illuminators, and generally of all who could usefully labour in
the service of books. Finally, all of both sexes and of every
rank or position who had any kind of association with books,
could most easily open by their knocking the door of our heart,
and find a fit resting-place in our affection and favour. In so
much did we receive those who brought books, that the multitude
of those who had preceded them did not lessen the welcome of the
after-comers, nor were the favours we had awarded yesterday
prejudicial to those of to-day. Wherefore, ever using all the
persons we have named as a kind of magnets to attract books, we
had the desired accession of the vessels of science and a
multitudinous flight of the finest volumes.

And this is what we undertook to narrate in the present chapter.

CHAPTER IX

HOW, ALTHOUGH WE PREFERRED THE WORKS OF THE ANCIENTS, WE HAVE NOT
CONDEMNED THE STUDIES OF THE MODERNS

Although the novelties of the moderns were never disagreeable to
our desires, who have always cherished with grateful affection
those who devote themselves to study and who add anything either
ingenious or useful to the opinions of our forefathers, yet we
have always desired with more undoubting avidity to investigate
the well-tested labours of the ancients. For whether they had by
nature a greater vigour of mental sagacity, or whether they
perhaps indulged in closer application to study, or whether they
were assisted in their progress by both these things, one thing
we are perfectly clear about, that their successors are barely
capable of discussing the discoveries of their forerunners, and
of acquiring those things as pupils which the ancients dug out by
difficult efforts of discovery. For as we read that the men of
old were of a more excellent degree of bodily development than
modern times are found to produce, it is by no means absurd to
suppose that most of the ancients were distinguished by brighter
faculties, seeing that in the labours they accomplished of both
kinds they are inimitable by posterity.  And so Phocas writes in
the prologue to his Grammar:

     Since all things have been said by men of sense      
     The only novelty is--to condense.

But in truth, if we speak of fervour of learning and diligence in
study, they gave up all their lives to philosophy; while nowadays
our contemporaries carelessly spend a few years of hot youth,
alternating with the excesses of vice, and when the passions have
been calmed, and they have attained the capacity of discerning
truth so difficult to discover, they soon become involved in
worldly affairs and retire, bidding farewell to the schools of
philosophy. They offer the fuming must of their youthful
intellect to the  difficulties of philosophy, and bestow the
clearer wine upon the money-making business of life. Further, as
Ovid in the first book of the De Vetula justly complains:

The hearts of all men after gold aspire;  
Few study to be wise, more to acquire:
Thus, Science! all thy virgin charms are sold,  
Whose chaste embraces should disdain their gold,  
Who seek not thee thyself, but pelf through thee,  
Longing for riches, not philosophy.

And further on:

Thus Philosophy is seen  
Exiled, and Philopecuny is queen,

which is known to be the most violent poison of learning.

How the ancients indeed regarded life as the only limit of study,
is shown by Valerius, in his book addressed to Tiberius, by many
examples. Carneades, he says, was a laborious and lifelong
soldier of wisdom: after he had lived ninety years, the same day
put an end to his life and his philosophizing. Isocrates in his
ninety-fourth year wrote a most noble work. Sophocles did the
same when nearly a hundred years old. Simonides wrote poems in
his eightieth year. Aulus Gellius did not desire to live longer
than he should be able to write, as he says himself in the
prologue to the Noctes Atticae.

The fervour of study which possessed Euclid the Socratic, Taurus
the philosopher used to relate to incite young men to study, as
Gellius tells in the book we have mentioned. For the Athenians,
hating the people of Megara, decreed that if any of the
Megarensians entered Athens, he should be put to death. Then
Euclid, who was a Megarensian, and had attended the lectures of
Socrates before this decree, disguising himself in a woman's
dress, used to go from Megara to Athens by night to hear
Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back. Imprudent and
excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of geometry, who
would not declare his name, nor lift his head from the diagram he
had drawn, by which he might have prolonged his life, but
thinking more of study than of life dyed with his life-blood the
figure he was studying.

There are very many such examples of our proposition, but the
brevity we aim at does not allow us to recall them. But, painful
to relate, the clerks who are famous in these days pursue a very
different course. Afflicted with ambition in their tender years,
and slightly fastening to their untried arms the Icarian wings of
presumption, they prematurely snatch the master's cap; and mere
boys become unworthy professors of the several faculties, through
which they do not make their way step by step, but like goats
ascend by leaps and bounds; and, having slightly tasted of the
mighty stream, they think that they have drunk it dry, though
their throats are hardly moistened. And because they are not
grounded in the first rudiments at the fitting time, they build a
tottering edifice on an unstable foundation, and now that they
have grown up, they are ashamed to learn what they ought to have
learned while young, and thus they are compelled to suffer for
ever for too hastily jumping at dignities they have not deserved.
For these and the like reasons the tyros in the schools do not
attain to the solid learning of the ancients in a few short hours
of study, although they may enjoy distinctions, may be accorded
titles, be authorized by official robes, and solemnly installed
in the chairs of the elders. Just snatched from the cradle and
hastily weaned, they mouth the rules of Priscian and Donatus;
while still beardless boys they gabble with childish stammering
the Categorics and Peri Hermeneias, in the writing of which the
great Aristotle is said to have dipped his pen in his heart's
blood. Passing through these faculties with baneful haste a