The mention of this library affords an occasion for speaking, though in the briefest terms, of the others which competed with it on the Continent: Lorsch, Reichenau near Constance, St Gall, Corbie in Picardy, St Riquier, Fleury on the Loire, Bobbio and Monte Cassino in Italy. These, I imagine, are all indisputably to be placed in the first class. Of them be it remembered that Fulda, Reichenau, St Gall, and Bobbio owe their being to these islands: Boniface, Pirminius, Gallus, Columban were their founders. How much further our list should stretch no two people would agree; but it would be absurd to omit the libraries of Tours, Rheims, St Denis, Mayence, Cologne, Trèves, Corvey in Westphalia (daughter of Corbie), Würzburg, Laon, Liège: or that of Verona, to which the archdeacon Pacificus († 846) added more than 200 volumes. Each of these had its importance as school or storehouse, and some, like St Gall, Würzburg, and Verona, have kept together a surprisingly large proportion of their ancient possessions up to the present day. Not so all those which were first named. The books of Fulda, of which we have a catalogue, made late in the sixteenth century, have very largely disappeared. Lorsch is better represented, in the libraries of the Vatican and elsewhere, Reichenau at Carlsruhe, Corbie at Paris, Petrograd, and Amiens, Fleury at Rome and Orleans, Bobbio at Rome, Milan, Turin, Vienna and Bamberg.
Among them these houses produced a great proportion of the ninth century manuscripts which exist to-day, and anyone who will be at the pains to examine Chatelain's Paléographie des Classiques Latins or Sabbadini's account of the rediscovery of the classics at the Renaissance will realise how much of what we have is due to the scribes who lived between, say, 800 and 950.
There are three Latin authors of the first class, Virgil, Terence, and Livy, of whom the whole or a considerable portion have survived in manuscripts of the classical period. Neglecting fragments, it may be said that the earliest copies of Caesar, Sallust, Lucretius, Juvenal, Persius, both Plinies, Tacitus, Lucan, Suetonius, Martial, the greater part of Ciccro, all date from the Carolingian Renaissance. There is, of course, something to be set against this immense debt: what, we ask, has become of the archetypes which the scribes of the ninth century used? It is to be feared that, once transcribed, they were cast aside as old and useless[1], and few of them allowed to live on even as palimpsests, for vellum was not so scarce as it had been. Still, the fact remains that they were copied, and that in such numbers as attest a vivid and widespread interest in the best literature that was accessible.
In Walafrid (Walahfridus) Straboor Strabus, the pupil of Raban Maur, we have another scholar of the direct Alcuinian succession. His career was not a long one (808-819), but the amount, and in some respects the
- ↑ There was some excuse for this. Books written in short lines, in capital letters, with the words undivided, cannot be read with ease or comfort.
