We turn to the Latin division, and here the difficulty of selecting
lines of procedure is very great. A paragraph of historical preface, at
any rate, must be attempted.
At the period of the Barbarian invasions--the fifth century--the learned
countries were Italy, France (especially Southern France) and Spain. Of
these three, Italy may be described as stationary or even decadent, but
she possessed greater accumulations of books than either of the other
two. The result of the invasions was, no doubt, that libraries were
destroyed and education dislocated; but there was another result, as we
have lately begun to realize--namely, that in the case of France there
was a transplanting of culture to another soil. A number of teachers
fled the country, and some at least came to Ireland. This, as far as we
can now see, was the beginning of that Irish learning which has been so
widely, yet so vaguely, extolled. Ireland, then, in the late fifth
century and the sixth, holds the lamp. Its light passes to England in
the middle of the seventh century, and from thence, near the end of the
eighth, to the Court of Charlemagne, where it initiates the Carolingian
Renaissance. In the ninth century, when England is a prey to the Danes,
the Carolingian Court and the great abbeys of Germany are enjoying a
vigorous intellectual life, stimulated and enriched by scholars from
Italy and from Ireland. In a general view the tenth and eleventh
centuries must figure as a period of degeneration; the twelfth as one of
immense intellectual and artistic vigour, culminating in the thirteenth.
In the fourteenth the foundations of what we call the Renaissance are
already being laid, and we have hardly passed the middle of the
fifteenth before the MS. has received its death-blow in the publication
of the first printed Bible.
This absurdly condensed review of ten centuries has, I believe, some
truth in it, in spite of the fact that every clause needs qualification.
We shall have to go over the same ground again a little more slowly. At
present we will devote a little time to the beginnings of our period.
A few relics of the days before the Barbarian invasion have reached us.
I am not thinking of the library of rolls found at Herculaneum in the
eighteenth century, the unrolling and decipherment of which still goes
on slowly at Naples, nor of the many precious fragments of rolls and
books which have come in our own generation from Egypt, but rather of
those which have been preserved above ground in libraries. Such are the
Virgils of the Vatican, of St. Gall, and of Florence.
Perhaps a word about these ancient Virgils will not be unwelcome. They
are cited in all the textbooks, it is true, but I think they are apt to
be confused; at any rate it is easy to confuse them.
They are five in number: three very fragmentary, two more or less
complete. The surnames they go by are _Sangallensis_, _Augusteus_,
_Vaticanus_, _Romanus_, _Mediceus_.
_Sangallensis_ and _Augusteus_ are practically the only pieces of books
we have which are written in the old square capitals, like those of the
Roman inscriptions. _Sangallensis_ consists of a few leaves which were
found by Von Arx, a librarian of St. Gall, in the bindings of books in
that abbey's library. Of _Augusteus_ there are four leaves at Rome
(_Vaticanus latinus_ 3,256) and three at Berlin; and somewhere, perhaps
in a private library in France, is or was another bit which was known to
scholars in the seventeenth century. This copy was once at the Royal
Abbey of St. Denis. Both of these are fourth-century books at latest.
_Vaticanus_ (_lat._ 3,225) is a more complete copy, illustrated with
fifty paintings in good classical style, and is also assigned to the
fourth century.
_Romanus_ (_Vat. lat._ 3,867), once at St. Denis, is a pictured copy
too, but not nearly so good in style.
_Mediceus_, written before A.D. 494, is at Florence (a single leaf of it
is bound up with _Vaticanus_). It was formerly in the abbey library of
Bobbio.