Mary asked him if there was any chance of their being found among the Herculaneum manuscripts?
“Very little indeed,” he replied. “When those famous rolls of papyrus were disinterred nearly eighty years ago, great expectations were formed, of the literary riches they might contain. Their original number was 1700, but by far the greater part were found, on closer inspection, to be so mangled that there was not the least probability of recovering any portion of their contents. Of those that were in a better condition, many were destroyed by the first awkward attempts to unrol them; and, unfortunately, the remainder have suffered great additional injury from long exposure to the air.”
“I should have thought,” said Wentworth, “that having been partly charred by fire, they would be proof against air and damp; as we find old stumps of charred gate posts in the ground, which seem to have remained there an immense time, perfectly unchanged.”
“Your reasoning,” replied my uncle, “would not apply to this case, even if the papyri had undergone the action of fire, because it is since their exposure to the atmosphere that they have suffered. They have, indeed, all the appearance of charcoal, even the sticks on which they are rolled; and it was therefore very naturally supposed that this effect had been produced by the heat of the lava which overflowed that devoted city; but Sir Humphry Davy has proved, that they were protected from the heat by a thick bed of sand and ashes, and, in his opinion, their charred appearance has been the result of a gradual process of decomposition.”
“What means, uncle, could be taken to unfold and read manuscripts that were in such a state? Surely all the characters must have been effaced.”
“No, not quite: the characters are seen black and shining upon the black but not shining surface; just in the same way that a letter sometimes appears after we have burnt it, the traces of writing being still visible on the gauzy substance, while it flickers about in the smoke, at the back of the grate. To unrol them, many ingenious contrivances were invented; that which I saw, when at Portici, and which, I believe, has been generally adopted, is to glue some thin flexible material to the back of the papyrus, and then to raise it gently by a number of threads, while the folds are at the same time carefully opened by a pin. In this way a few of the most perfect have actually been restored, and published; but, to the great disappointment of the world, they are works of no value. One is a treatise on the inutility of music, in Greek; a few pages of a Latin poem, and some other fragments, but all equally uninteresting. One of the chief difficulties arose from the adhesion of the folds, as if they had been gummed together; and to conquer this Sir Humphry applied the resources of his profound chemical knowledge. He exposed some of the fragments to the action of chlorine, and to the vapour of iodine, and succeeded to a considerable extent in loosening and detaching the folds; but the jealousy of the Neapolitans prevented his further progress, and he left them to pursue their own plans. Unfortunately, the best specimens were operated on long ago, and those that now remain are in too mutilated a state to afford much hope for the future.”
“But,” said Caroline, “as they are rapidly unburying Pompeii, perhaps some manuscripts may be found there—and in a much more perfect state; for Pompeii was covered with mud and ashes, and not with burning lava like Herculaneum.”
“Several rolls of papyrus,” my uncle replied, “have been already found in the houses of Pompeii, but all in a far worse condition than those of Herculaneum,—having nearly the appearance of the white ashes produced by burning common paper.”
“Then, uncle,” said I, “to what quarter do you look for the lost books of Livy?”
“To the vast collections of vellum manuscripts,” he answered, “which have for centuries been accumulating in public and private libraries. It has been discovered, that many of these have been twice written upon, and some even three times. In the middle ages the art of reading and writing was almost entirely confined to the monks; and all true taste for literature being suspended, it was natural that they should consider the finest effusions of the ancient poets, or the most important records of profane history, as of little value, in comparison with the statutes of their own order, or the histories of their general councils. It appears, therefore, to have been a common practice of those times, to expunge the writing on the parchment manuscripts in their possession, in order to substitute copies of those works which they estimated so much more highly; and in some instances the former characters have been discovered, and successfully traced.”