The calamity not only strongly stirred the feelings of men, and upon the whole, I think, beneficially, but it immediately stimulated their ingenuity.  It was wonderful to see the energy with which men discussed the subject, and the zeal, too, with which they ultimately exerted themselves to repair the loss.  I could even hardly regret it, when I considered what a spectacle of intense activity, intellectual and moral, the visitation had occasioned.  It was very early suggested, that the whole Bible had again and again been quoted piecemeal in one book or other; that it had impressed its own image on the surface of human literature, and had been reflected on its course as the stars on a steam.  But, alas! on investigation, it was found as vain to expect that the gleam of starlight would still remain mirrored in the water when the clouds had veiled the stars themselves, as that the bright characters of the Bible would remain reflected in the books of man when had been erased from the Book of God.  On inspection it was found that every text, every phrase which had been quoted, not only in the books of devotion and theology, but in those of poetry and fiction, had been remorselessly expunged.  Never before had I had any adequate idea of the extent to which the Bible had moulded the intellectual and moral life of the last eighteen centuries, nor how intimately it had interfused itself with habits of thought and modes of expression; nor how naturally and extensively its comprehensive imagery and language had been introduced into human writings, and most of all where there had been most of genius.  A vast portion of literature became instantly worthless, and was transformed into so much waste-paper.  It was almost impossible to look into any book of any merit, and read ten pages together, without coming to some provoking erasures and mutilations, some “hiatus valde deflendi,” which made whole passages perfectly unintelligible.  Many of the sweetest passages of Shakspeare were converted into unmeaning nonsense, from the absence of those words which his own all but divine genius had appropriated from a still diviner source.  As to Milton, he was nearly ruined, as might naturally be supposed.  Walter Scott’s novels were filled with perpetual lacunae.  I hoped it might be otherwise with the philosophers, and so it was; but even here it was curious to see what strange ravages the visitation had wrought.  Some of the most beautiful and comprehensive of Bacon’s Aphorisms were reduced to enigmatical nonsense.

Those who held large stocks of books knew not what to do.  Ruin stared them in the face; their value fell seventy or eighty per cent.  All branches of theology, in particular, were a drug.  One fellow said, that he should not so much have minded if the miracle had sponged out what was human as well as what was divine, for in that case he would at least have had so many thousand volumes of fair blank paper, which was as much as many of them were worth before.