As a postscript to this story, Mr. Timmins, of Birmingham, informs me that the treasures of the Monte Cassino Library are better cared for now than in Boccaccio’s days, the worthy prior being proud of his valuable MSS. and very willing to show them.  It will interest many readers to know that there is now a complete printing office, lithographic as well as typographic, at full work in one large room of the Monastery, where their wonderful MS. of Dante has been already reprinted, and where other fac-simile works are now in progress.

CHAPTER V.

IGNORANCE AND BIGOTRY.

IGNORANCE, though not in the same category as fire and water, is a great destroyer of books.  At the Reformation so strong was the antagonism of the people generally to anything like the old idolatry of the Romish Church, that they destroyed by thousands books, secular as well as sacred, if they contained but illuminated letters.  Unable to read, they saw no difference between romance and a psalter, between King Arthur and King David; and so the paper books with all their artistic ornaments went to the bakers to heat their ovens, and the parchment manuscripts, however beautifully illuminated, to the binders and boot makers.

There is another kind of ignorance which has often worked destruction, as shown by the following anecdote, which is extracted from a letter written in 1862 by M. Philarete Chasles to Mr. B. Beedham, of Kimbolton:—­

“Ten years ago, when turning out an old closet in the Mazarin Library, of which I am librarian, I discovered at the bottom, under a lot of old rags and rubbish, a large volume.  It had no cover nor title-page, and had been used to light the fires of the librarians.  This shows how great was the negligence towards our literary treasure before the Revolution; for the pariah volume, which, 60 years before, had been placed in the Invalides, and which had certainly formed part of the original Mazarin collections, turned out to be a fine and genuine Caxton.”

I saw this identical volume in the Mazarin Library in April, 1880.  It is a noble copy of the First Edition of the “Golden Legend,” 1483, but of course very imperfect.

Among the millions of events in this world which cross and re-cross one another, remarkable coincidences must often occur; and a case exactly similar to that at the Mazarin Library, happened about the same time in London, at the French Protestant Church, St. Martin’s-le-Grand.  Many years ago I discovered there, in a dirty pigeon hole close to the grate in the vestry, a fearfully mutilated copy of Caxton’s edition of the Canterbury Tales, with woodcuts.  Like the book at Paris, it had long been used, leaf by leaf, in utter ignorance of its value, to light the vestry fire.  Originally worth at least L800, it was then worth half, and, of course, I energetically drew the attention of the minister in charge to it, as well as to another grand