A larger, but still small, group of books of "classical" date are the
palimpsests, the most famous of which are at Milan and Rome. There was a
time, early in the nineteenth century, when Angelo Mai, afterwards
Cardinal, and Prefect of the Vatican Library, was constantly launching
fresh surprises upon scholars, the results of his work in what was then
an almost untouched field. Large fragments of Cicero's _Republic_, of
lost orations of Cicero, of the works of the rhetorician Fronto, were
issued at short intervals: and all the most important of these were
recovered from palimpsests in the Ambrosian or the Vatican Library. They
had all come, too, from one place, the same Bobbio which has been
already named. Bobbio was founded by the Irishman St. Columban (d. 615).
The list of the early and valuable MSS. which can be traced to it would
take up a large share of my available space; but among the precious
things it owned was a number of quite ancient volumes, the Cicero and
Fronto and others--books sumptuously written in uncial letters in the
fourth century, which, sad to say, the Bobbio monks themselves broke up,
washed out the earlier writing, and covered the pages with texts more
immediately useful to them. Whence did they come? An answer to that
question has been offered recently which finds favour among experts.
They are the relics, it is said, of the library formed by Cassiodorus at
his monastery of Vivarium or Squillace, in South Italy. Cassiodorus is
a great figure in the history of his own time, and in his influence upon
the general course of learning. He was private secretary to Theodoric
King of the Goths; in his old age he retired from public to monastic
life, and his last years were devoted to equipping the monks he had
gathered about him for study--first and foremost the study of the
Scriptures, but also, as leading up to that, the study of languages, of
history and geography, and, as conducing to the general welfare, of
medicine, botany, and other useful arts. It had been a cherished project
of his to found an academy at Rome where all such learning might be
fostered, but that plan failed, and Cassiodorus took into his retreat at
Vivarium all the store of books he had accumulated, and wrote a little
manual to guide his monks to the right use of them. His _Institutes_ (as
the book is called) do not give a set catalogue of his library, but
there are many and striking coincidences between the manual and the
literary works which can be traced to Bobbio. A specimen may be given:
he recommends a writer on gardening called Gargilius Martialis. Hardly
anyone else mentions this person, and his work had disappeared until Mai
found pieces of it in a palimpsest at Naples which had come from Bobbio.
We owe much to Cassiodorus in any case, for it was he who commended
secular learning to monks, and the fact that monks were the great
preservers of ancient literature cannot be dissociated from his
influence. I shall be glad if the theory I have stated (it is that of
the late Dr. Rudolf Beer) proves sound; to have some of the very volumes
which Cassiodorus handled would be worth much.
There is a link between the library of Cassiodorus and our own country.
A famous Latin Bible now at Florence, the _Codex Amiatinus_, is known to
have been once in England, at Wearmouth or Jarrow, and to have been
taken abroad by Ceolfrid, Abbot of those monasteries, in 716 as a
present to the Pope, whom it never reached, for Ceolfrid died at Langres
on his way to Rome. The story has often been told, and needs not to be
dwelt upon here; but a view has been broached, and is stoutly maintained
by Sir Henry Howorth, which does deserve mention and is not yet
familiar. It is that the first quire in the Amiatine Bible, which
contains pictures and lists of Biblical books, is actually a portion of
a Bible written for Cassiodorus. There is much to be said for this, and
at the least we may be sure that it is a direct copy from such a Bible.
Sir Henry would go farther, and claim the whole book as Cassiodorian. I
do not know that expert opinion is prepared to endorse this.
The mention of Cassiodorus has led us below the date of the "classical"
period, for he died in 583. For one moment I revert to the earlier time
to record an interesting example of wandering. Illustrated books of the
early centuries are the greatest of rarities. The two Virgils, the
Vienna and the Cotton Genesis, the Homer at Milan, the Gospels of
Rossano in Calabria and those of Sinope now at Paris, the Dioscorides at
Vienna, the Pentateuch of Tours, the Joshua-roll at the Vatican--these
are the most famous, and there are very few beside them. Among those few
are some pieces of a Latin Bible written in the fourth century, and
containing parts of Samuel and Kings, with paintings which, when fresh,
must have been of high excellence. They have unhappily suffered grievous
damage, for they were used in the seventeenth century to make covers for
municipal documents at the royal and ancient abbatial town of
Quedlinburg (the scene of Canning's _Rovers_). The painted leaves are
now at Berlin; a leaf of plain text remains at Quedlinburg. No one
doubts that the book to which they belonged was made in Italy, and the
likeliest history that can be imagined for it is that it was brought as
a gift to the abbey by a German prince, say in the tenth century. It is
hard to explain the neglect and mutilation of so noble a book, in whose
contents there was nothing to offend Protestant or other religious
susceptibilities. Only we find, by numerous examples, that the MSS. we
should most prize now, those written in capitals or uncials with the
words undivided, or in Irish or English scripts which became
unfamiliar, were uniformly despised and neglected by the readers of
later centuries. We meet with notes of this kind in monastic catalogues:
"It cannot be read," "Old and useless," and the like. Still, one would
have thought that the pictures of the Quedlinburg book would have saved
it, even in a German nunnery.