HISTORY
OF
THE TRANSMISSION OF ANCIENT BOOKS TO MODERN TIMES;

TOGETHER WITH

THE PROCESS OF HISTORICAL PROOF;

OR,

A CONCISE ACCOUNT OF THE MEANS BY WHICH THE GENUINENESS OF ANCIENT LITERATURE GENERALLY, AND THE AUTHENTICITY OF HISTORICAL WORKS ESPECIALLY, ARE ASCERTAINED; INCLUDING INCIDENTAL REMARKS UPON THE RELATIVE STRENGTH OF THE EVIDENCE USUALLY ADDUCED IN BEHALF OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.

BY ISAAC TAYLOR.

VERI SCIENTIA VINDEX.

A New Edition, Revised and Enlarged.

LONDON:
JACKSON AND WALFORD,
18, ST. PAUL’S CHURCHYARD.
1859.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY RICHARD CLAY, BREAD STREET HILL.

PREFACE.

Two books which appeared more than thirty years ago, and which have been long out of print, are brought into one in this volume. The second of them—the “Process of Historical Proof,” was, in fact, a sequel to the first—the “History of the Transmission of Ancient Books to Modern Times.” In now reprinting the two, as one, it has not been difficult to give continuity to the whole: this has been effected, partly by removing from each volume portions which seemed to be of secondary importance, and to be not closely related to the principal intention of the work; and partly by introducing several entire chapters of new material; and by the insertion of additional paragraphs throughout. What is new in this volume occurs chiefly in the mid portions of it, and at the end.

In the course of this thirty years, the labours of critics, combined with the researches of learned travellers, have thrown much light upon all parts of the subject which is compendiously treated in this volume. No reader who is fully informed in this department will need to be told that, within the limits of a volume such as this, nothing more than the most concise mention of these recent labours and researches could be attempted: they are referred to only in the way of suggestion and of sample. At the first, the two books above mentioned were intended to find a place in a course of general educational reading; and it is only as coming within the range of a purpose such as this, that the Reprint is now offered to the public.

In excluding from the Reprint some chapters of the two volumes which related expressly to the Biblical argument, or “Christian Evidences,” I have been influenced by several reasons—such as these: The first of them is this, that what may be regarded as the religious aspect of the general subject has no direct claim to be included in the treatment of it. In the next place, I have believed—and think so decisively—that, for the very purpose of bringing the Biblical argument home, with the greatest force, to the convictions of intelligent young persons, the subject should be fully understood in its broadest aspect. When it is thus presented, and when it is thus understood, well-informed and ingenuous persons will see and feel, irresistibly, that, as compared with any other mass of facts belonging to literary antiquarianism, and to historic evidence, the Biblical evidence is many times more ample, and various, and is more unquestionably certain, than even the best and the surest of those masses of facts.

There is yet another reason that has induced me to retrench, in this Reprint, much that, thirty years ago, might seem proper to the treatment of the subject. In this course of time a great change has had place upon the field of argument touching Christianity and its origin. Although disbelief may have spread widely of late, the argument concerning Christianity has been narrowed on every side of it. Much that, a while ago, was thought to need the production of proof, has, within a few years, quite ceased to be spoken of as questionable. Several elaborate and ingenious endeavours to bring, first, the documents of Christianity, and then, the historic import of those documents, into doubt, have signally failed, and in fact they are abandoned as nugatory and hopeless. It would, therefore, be a superfluous labour at this time to defend positions which have ceased to be assailed.

The course of adverse thought, at this time, in relation to the religion of Christ—the only religion concerning which any question can be raised—has this tendency, namely, to divert attention by all means, and as much as possible, from the past; and to engage all attention, and to concentrate it, upon the present moment, and upon its tangible and secular interests. This is now the aim of those writers, in the departments of Philosophy—physical and abstract, who would subvert Christianity, and who labour to do so by drawing the thoughts of the educated classes away from it—away from its neighbourhood. If it be so, then it must be well for those who take the other side, to do what they may for calling back the same classes, and for challenging them to acquaint themselves anew with History, and to assure themselves of its incontestible certainty.

Stanford Rivers,
February, 1859.

CONTENTS.

HISTORY
OF THE
TRANSMISSION OF ANCIENT BOOKS.

CHAPTER I.
INTENTION OF THE PRESENT ARGUMENT.

The credit of ancient literature, the certainty of history, and the truth of religion, are all involved in the secure transmission of ancient books to modern times. Many of the facts connected with the history of this transmission are to be found, more or less distinctly mentioned, in every work in which the claims of the Holy Scriptures are advocated. But these facts are open to much misapprehension when they are brought together to subserve the purposes of a single argument. It is the intention of this volume therefore to lay them before general readers, as they stand apart from controversy, and as if no interests more important than those of literature were implicated in the result of the statements we have to make.

Nothing can be more equitable than that the genuineness and authenticity of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures should be judged of by the rules that are applied to all other ancient books; nor is anything more likely to produce a firm and intelligent conviction of the validity of the claims advanced for the Holy Scriptures, than a clear understanding of the relative value of the evidence which supports them. To furnish the means therefore of instituting a comparison, so just in itself, and so necessary to a fair examination of the most important of all questions, is the design of these pages.

As this volume makes no pretension to communicate information to those who are already conversant with matters of antiquity, literary or historical, whatever might seem recondite, or what is still involved in controversy, has been avoided. Nor will these pages be encumbered with numerous references, which, though easily amassed, would increase the size of the volume without being serviceable to the class of readers for whom the author now writes. No facts are adduced which may not readily be substantiated by any one who has access to a library of moderate extent. But a few works, not often met with in private collections, are named at the foot of the page where special information has been derived from them.

The principal facts of ancient history, and the authenticity of the works from which chiefly our knowledge of antiquity is derived, are now freely admitted, after a few exceptive instances have been set off, which are unproved, or doubtful.

Yet on this subject, as well as upon some others, there often exists, at the same time, too much faith, and too little; for, from a want of acquaintance with the details on which-a rational conviction of the genuineness and validity of ancient records may be founded, many persons, even though otherwise well informed, feel that they have hardly an alternative between a simple acceptance of the entire mass of ancient history, or an equally indiscriminate suspicion of the whole. And when it happens that a particular fact comes to be questioned, or when the genuineness of some ancient book is argued, such persons, conscious that they are little familiar with the nature of the evidence on the strength of which the question turns, and perceiving that the controversy involves many recondite and uninteresting researches, or that it rests upon the validity of minute criticisms, either recoil altogether from the argument, or they accept an opinion, without inquiry, from that party on whose judgment they think they may most safely rely.

And it is true that such controversies may, for the most part, very properly be left in the hands of critics and antiquarians, whose tastes and acquirements qualify them for investigations that can scarcely be made intelligible to the mass of readers. Nor are the facts involved in these controversies often of any importance to the general student of history; for they do not extensively affect the integrity of that department of literature to which they belong. Yet it must be allowed that the principles on which such questions are argued, and the facts connected with the transmission of ancient literature to modern times, are in themselves highly important; and that they well deserve more attention than they often receive. Nor are these facts, when separated from particular controversies, at all abstruse, or difficult of apprehension. Indeed much of the information that bears upon the subject is in itself curious and highly interesting, as well as important.

Even in relation to those works of genius, the value of which consists in their intrinsic merits, and which would not be robbed of their beauties, though they were discovered to be spurious, an assurance of their genuineness is felt by every reader to conduce greatly to the pleasure they impart. But a much stronger feeling naturally leads us to demand this assurance in the perusal of works which profess to have reality only for their matter:—Truth is the very subject of History:—the adducing of satisfactory evidence, therefore, of the integrity of its records may well be deemed an indispensable preliminary to a course of study in that department of knowledge.

Besides its peculiar propriety in connexion with the study of history, the argument in support of the genuineness and authenticity of the existing remains of ancient literature is singularly fitted to afford a useful exercise to the reasoning faculties; and perhaps, better than any other subject, it calls into combined action those powers of the mind that are separately employed in mathematical, physical, or legal pursuits, and which, in the actual occasions of common life, can subserve our welfare only so far as they move in unison.

But reasons of still greater moment recommend the subject of the following pages to the attention of the reader; for it is certain that every one, whether or not he is contented to admit, without inquiry, the authenticity of profane history, has the highest personal concern in the truth of that particular portion of ancient history with which the Christian religion is connected; and, therefore, every one should think himself bound to convince himself of the genuineness of the books in which its principles are contained. And as the facts on which this proof depends are precisely of the same kind in profane, as in sacred literature, and as the same principles of evidence are applicable to all questions relating to the genuineness of ancient books, it is highly desirable that the proof of the genuineness of the Sacred Writings should be viewed—in its place, as forming a part only of a general argument, which bears equally upon the entire literary remains of antiquity. For it is only when so viewed, that the comparative strength and completeness of the proof which belongs to this particular case, can be duly estimated. When exhibited in this light it will be seen that the integrity of the records of the Christian faith is substantiated by evidence in a tenfold proportion more various, copious, and conclusive, than that which can be adduced in support of any other ancient writings. If, therefore, the question had no other importance belonging to it than what may attach to a purely literary inquiry, or if only the strict justice of the case were regarded, the authenticity of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures could never come to be controverted, till the entire body of classical literature had been proved to be spurious.

Many—perhaps most persons, in perusing works on the evidences of revealed religion, are apt to suppose that the sacred books only, or that these books, more than any others, stand in need of laboured argumentation in support of their authenticity; while, in truth, these books, less than any other ancient writings, need a careful investigation of their claims; for the proof that establishes them is on all points obvious and redundant. Indeed this very redundancy and variety of evidence—especially if it be unskilfully adduced, may actually produce confusion and hesitancy, rather than an affirmed conviction, in unpractised minds; and this perplexity is likely to be increased by the very idea of the serious importance of the subject. Thus it may happen that those very facts which, if compared with others of a similar kind, are susceptible of the most complete proof, are actually regarded with the most distrust.

In presenting to the reader, what might be called—the History of the records of History, we shall put him in position for tracing the extant works of ancient authors retrogressively, from modern times, up to the age to which they are usually attributed; and then it will be seen on what grounds—under certain limitations—the contents of these works are admitted to be authentic, and worthy of credit. In attending to the facts which we have to adduce it will appear that we are well warranted in accepting certain works as having been written in the age to which they are usually assigned, and by the authors to whom they are commonly attributed; and also in believing that they have not suffered material corruption in the course of transcription.

Further than this we may advance, and go on to show the grounds of our belief that such or such an author wrote what he believed to be true, and that he possessed authentic information on the subject of which he treats. The proof in this case must be drawn from the style and character of the work itself; from the circumstances that attended its first publication; from the corroborative evidence of contemporary writers; and from the agreement of the narrative in particular instances with existing relics of antiquity.

Evidence in support of the first part of this assumption will prove that the works in question are not forgeries:—evidence establishing the second, will show that they are not fictions.

It is obvious that these assumptions are not only distinct, but that they are independent of each other:—for one of them may be conclusively established, while the other is either disproved, or may remain questionable. A book may contain a true narrative of events, though not written by the author, or in the age, that has commonly been supposed. Or, on the other hand, it may undoubtedly be the production of the alleged author, but may deserve little credit as a professed record of facts. Thus, for example, the Cyropædia is, on good evidence, attributed to Xenophon; but there is little reason to suppose that it deserves to be considered as better than an historical romance:—the genuineness of the work is certain; but its authenticity as a history is, at the best, questionable. Yet the first of these propositions is more independent of the second, than the second can be of the first. For when the antiquity and genuineness of an historical work has been clearly demonstrated, it is seldom difficult to fix the degree of credit that is due to the author; or to discover those particular points on which there may be reason to suspect his veracity, or to question the soundness of his judgment, or to doubt the accuracy of his information.

It is then for the purpose of rendering these arguments and inferences intelligible, and more satisfactory also, than otherwise they would be, that, after giving a brief statement of this argument, we shall proceed to bring forward what relates to the manipulative and mechanical methods of multiplying copies of books, and to the diffusion, and preservation of these copies, in ancient times;—that is to say, in all times anterior to the invention of Printing, in the fifteenth century.

CHAPTER II.
STATEMENT OF THE CASE, AS TO THE AUTHENTICITY OF ANCIENT BOOKS.

The antiquity and genuineness of the extant remains of ancient literature may be established by three lines of proof that are altogether independent of each other; and though, in any particular instance, one, or even two out of the three should be wanting, the remaining one may alone be perfectly conclusive:—When the three concur, they present a redundant demonstration of the facts in question.

The first line of proof relates to the history of certain copies of a work, which are now in existence.

The second—traces the history of a work as it may be collected from the series of references made to it by succeeding writers.

The third—is drawn from the known history of the language in which the work is extant.

For understanding what belongs to the first of these three lines of evidence we ought to be acquainted with various particulars relating to the modes of writing practised among ancient nations, and to the materials employed, and to what may be called the business-system by means of which an ancient writer placed himself in communication with his readers.

In many, or in most of these particulars ancient and modern usages are very dissimilar. But something more should first be said indicative of the purpose with a view to which these facts are brought forward.

It need scarcely be said that the antiquity and integrity of a book can be open to no question, if in any case the existence of any one copy of it can be traced back, with certainty, to the time of its first publication. If, for example, a manuscript of a work in the author’s handwriting were still extant, and if the fact of its being such could by any means be proved, our argument would be concluded, and any other evidence must be deemed superfluous. There are however few such unquestionable autographs to be found, even of modern works, and none, of any ancient one. Yet the circumstances attending the preservation and transmission of manuscripts are, in some instances, as we shall see, such as to prove the antiquity and genuineness of a work with little less certainty than as if the very first copy of it were in existence.

But before we enter into the particulars of this proof it should be mentioned—especially as we intend to follow the order of time retrogressively, that the history of manuscripts need not be traced through any later period than that of the early part of the fifteenth century, when most of the classic authors passed through the press. For the invention of printing has served, as well to ascertain, beyond doubt, the existence of books at certain dates, as to secure the text from extensive interpolation and corruption. A printed book is not susceptible of subsequent interpolation or alteration by the pen: it bears also a date, and the issuing of different editions of the same work from distant places, would render any falsification of date in one of them, or any material corruption of the text by an editor, a nugatory attempt. For example, there are now extant, printed copies of the history of the Peloponnesian war, dated “Venice, 1502;” other copies of an edition of the same work are dated “Florence, 1506;” others are dated “Basil, 1540;” and others, printed within a few years of the same time at Paris and Vienna. On being compared with each other, these editions are found to agree in the main; and yet to disagree in many small variations of orthography, syntax, or expression; so as to prove that they were derived independently from different manuscripts; and not successively from each other. These printed editions, therefore, sufficiently prove the existence of the work in the fifteenth century; and also that the text of the modern editions has not been materially impaired or corrupted during the last four hundred years.

But let it now be imagined, that there are no other means of ascertaining the antiquity and genuineness of the classic authors than such as may be collected from the history of existing manuscripts. Our object then will be to discover to what age they may clearly be traced; and to deduce from the facts some sure inference relative to the length of time during which those works have been passing through the hands of copyists.

The date of an ancient manuscript may be ascertained by such means as the following:—

1. Some manuscripts are known to have been carefully preserved in the libraries where they are now found, for several centuries:—for not only have they been mentioned in the catalogues of the depositories to which they belong, but they have been so accurately described by eminent scholars of succeeding ages, that no doubt can remain of their identity. Or even if they have changed hands, the particulars of the successive transfers have been authentically recorded.

2. A large proportion of existing manuscripts are found to be dated by the hand of the copyists, and in such a manner as to leave no question as to the time when the copy was executed.

3. Many manuscripts have marginal notes, added evidently by later hands, which through some incidental allusion to persons, events, or particular customs, or by the use of peculiar forms of expression, indicate clearly the age of the notes, and therefore carry that of the original manuscript somewhat higher.

4. The remote antiquity of a manuscript is often established by the peculiar circumstance of its existing beneath another writing. These re-written manuscripts—palimpsests, or rescripts, as they are termed, afford the most satisfactory proof of antiquity that can be imagined. Parchment, which has always been a costly material, came to be greatly enhanced in price at the time when paper, manufactured from the papyrus of the Nile, began to be scarce, and just before the time when that formed from cotton—called charta bombycina, was brought into general use. At the same period, owing to the general decline of learning, the works of the classic authors fell into very general neglect. Those, therefore, who were copyists by profession, and the monks especially, whose libraries often contained large collections of parchment books, availed themselves of the valuable material which they possessed, by erasing, or washing out, the original writing, and then substituting lives of the saints, religious romances, meditations, or such other inanities as suited the taste of the times. Nevertheless, often, the faithful skin, tenacious of its pristine honours, retained the traces of the original writing with sufficient distinctness to render it still legible. These rescripts, therefore, offer to us a double proof of the antiquity of the work which first occupied the parchment; for in most cases the date of the monkish writing is easily ascertained to be of the twelfth, or even the ninth century. The writing which first occupied such parchments must, of course, be dated considerably higher; for it is much more probable that old, than that recent books should have been selected for the purpose of erasure. Some invaluable manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures, and not a few precious fragments of classic literature, have been thus brought to light.

5. The age of a manuscript may often be ascertained, with little chance of error, by some such indications as the following:—the quality or appearance of the ink; the nature of the material; that is to say, whether it be soft leather, or parchment, or the papyrus of Egypt, or the bombycine paper; for these materials succeeded each other, in common use, at periods that are well known;—the peculiar form, size, and character of the writing; for a regular progression in the modes of writing may be traced by abundant evidence through every age from the remotest times;—the style of the ornaments or illuminations, as they are termed, often serves to indicate the age of the book which they decorate.

From such indications as these, more or less definite and certain, ancient manuscripts, now extant, are assigned to various periods, extending from the sixteenth, to the fourth century of the Christian era; or perhaps, in one or two instances, to the third, or second. Very few can claim an antiquity so high as the fourth century: but not a few are safely attributed to the seventh; and a great proportion of those extant were unquestionably executed in the tenth; while many belong to the following four hundred years. It is, however, to be observed, that some manuscripts, executed at so late a time as the thirteenth, or even the fifteenth century, afford clear internal evidence that, by a single remove only, the text they contain claims a real antiquity, higher than that even of the oldest existing copy of the same work. For these older copies sometimes prove, by the peculiar nature of the corruptions which have crept into the text, that they have been derived through a long series of copies; while perhaps the text of the more modern manuscript possesses such a degree of purity and freedom from all the usual consequences of frequent transcription, as to make it manifest that the copy from which it was taken, was so ancient as not to be far distant from the time of the first publication of the work.

Most, if not all, the Royal and Ecclesiastical and University libraries in Europe, as well as many private collections, contain great numbers of these literary relics of antiquity: and some of them could furnish manuscripts of nearly the entire body of ancient literature. There are few of the classic authors that are not still extant in several manuscript copies; and of some, the existing copies are almost numberless.

Although all the larger ancient libraries, such, for example, as those of Alexandria, of Constantinople, of Athens, and of Rome, were destroyed by the fanaticism of barbarian conquerors; yet so extensive a diffusion of the most celebrated works had previously taken place, throughout the Roman empire, and beyond its limits, that all parts of Europe and Western Asia abounded with smaller collections, or with single works in the hands of private persons. When learning had almost disappeared among the people, monasteries and religious houses became the chief receptacles of books; for almost every such establishment included individuals who still cultivated literature and the sciences with ardour; and who found no difficulty in amassing almost any quantity of this generally neglected property.

Happily for literature, religious houses were places of greater security than even the strongholds of the nobles, or the palaces of kings, which by conquest or revolution were, from time to time, violently rent from their possessors. Meantime, these sacred seclusions were usually respected, even by the fiercest invaders. Through a long course of ages, monasteries were occupied by an order of men who succeeded each other in a far more tranquil course of transition than has taken place in any other instance, that might be named. The property of each establishment (and its literary property was always highly prized) passed down, from age to age, as if under the hand of a permanent proprietor, and it was therefore subjected to fewer dispersions or destructions than the mutability of human affairs ordinarily permits.

Every church, and every convent and monastery had its library, its librarian, and its other officers, employed in the conservation of the books. Connected with the library was the Scriptorium—the hall or chamber where the elder or the educated monks employed themselves in making copies of such books as were falling into decay; or of such as there was still some demand for, in the open world.

By means such as these it was that the literature of more enlightened ages has been preserved from extinction; and when at length learning revived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a large portion of those long-hoarded volumes flowed into the collections of the munificent founders of libraries, and there, having become known to the learned, they were speedily consigned to the immortal custody of the press.

The places in which these remains of ancient literature had been preserved, during the middle ages, were too many, and they were too distant from each other, and they were too little connected by any kind of intercourse, to admit of a combination or conspiracy having for its object any supposed purposes of interpolation or corruption. Possessing therefore as we do, in most cases, copies of the same author, some of which were drawn from the monasteries of England, others from those of Spain, and others collected in Egypt, Palestine, or Asia Minor, if, on comparing them, we find that they agree, except in variations of little moment, we have an incontestable proof of the care and integrity with which the business of transcription had generally been conducted. For it is evident that if the practice of mutilation, interpolation, and corruption, had to any considerable extent been admitted, the existing remains of ancient authors, after so long a time, would have retained scarcely a trace of integrity or uniformity. A licentious practice of transcription, operating through the course of a thousand or fifteen hundred years, must have resulted, not in giving us the connected and consistent works we actually possess, but only a heterogeneous mass of mangled fragments.

But now, if the general accordance of existing manuscripts attests the prevailing care, and even the scrupulousness of those through whose hands they passed, the peculiar nature of the diversities that do exist among the several copies of the same author, serves to establish a fact which, if we did not know it by other means, it would be of the highest importance to prove: namely, that these works had already descended through a long course of time, when the existing copies were executed. This fact is especially apparent in the case of the earlier Greek authors; for while some copies retain uniformly the peculiarities of the dialect in which the author wrote; in others, these peculiarities are merged in those more common forms of the language which prevailed after the time of the decline of the Greek literature. These deviations in orthography, or in construction, from the author’s text, were evidently made by successive copyists in compliance with the tastes of purchasers of books in different countries; nor were they likely to have been effected by transcribers of the middle ages, when these books were no longer in use by readers to whom the language was vernacular, and to whom, alone, an accordance with the colloquial forms of the language could be a matter of any importance.

Books in a dead language, and which can be intended for the use of the learned only, will never be accommodated to the colloquial fashions of an intermediate period. Let us consider how it would be in an instance familiar to us. If, for example, in examining two editions of the poems of Chaucer, one of them should be found to retain the original peculiarities of orthography, proper to the author’s time, while, in the other, those peculiarities are all softened down into the forms adopted in the reign of Elizabeth, we should certainly attribute the edition to that period rather than suppose the corrections to have been made by a modern editor.

Again:—some copies of ancient authors present instances in which, when a passage is compared with the same in another copy, it is easy to perceive that an early transcriber, having fallen into an error, more than one succeeding transcriber has attempted a restoration of the genuine reading; for the last conjectural emendation has plainly been framed out of two or three prior corrections.

Thus it is, then, that the existing manuscripts of the classic authors may be traced up, either by direct evidence, or by unquestionable inferences, very near to the age—and, in many instances—quite up to the age when these works were universally diffused, were familiarly known, and were incessantly quoted by other writers; and when, therefore, the history of each work may easily and abundantly be collected from the testimony of contemporary and succeeding authors. The various facts, above alluded to, serve to connect the literary remains of antiquity—now in our hands, with the period of their pristine existence:—we traverse the long era of general ignorance—that wide gulf which separates the intelligence and civilization of antiquity from the intelligence and civilization of modern times, and we land, as it were, upon the native soil of these monuments of Mind, and we once more find ourselves surrounded by that abundance of evidence which belongs to an advanced state of knowledge. We need not wish to trace the history of manuscripts further, than to the confines of that former world of learning and refinement.

Indeed we need not be solicitous to trace the history of these literary relics a step further than fairly into the midst of the dark ages. For even if all external and correlative evidence were wanting, and if nothing were known concerning the classic authors except this—that, such as they now are, they were extant in the tenth century, more than enough would be known to make it abundantly certain that these works were the product of a very different, and of a distant age. The men of those times might indeed have been the transcribers and conservators, and perhaps even the admirers, of Thucydides, of Xenophon, of Aristophanes, of Plato, of Virgil, of Cicero, of Horace, and of Tacitus; but assuredly they were not the authors of books, such as those which bear these names. The living pictures of energy, and of wisdom, and of liberty, which these monuments of taste and genius contain, could never have been imagined in the cells of a monastery, nor composed in an age when little was to be seen abroad but ignorance, violence, and slavery; and little found within but a dreaming philosophy, and a degrading superstition. It is not the prerogative of the human mind, however great may be its native powers, to trespass far beyond the bounds of the scene by which it is immediately surrounded, or to frame images of things which, in their elements, as well as in their adjuncts, belong to a system and an economy altogether unknown to the men of that time. To the genius of man it is given to imitate, to select, to refine, and to exalt; but not to create.

The general import of the facts that have thus been briefly stated, is this, namely, that the books now extant, and which are usually attributed to the Greek and Roman writers, have, such as we find them, descended from a very remote age. But this general affirmation must always be understood to include an exception of those smaller omissions, additions, and alterations in the text, which have taken place, either by design, or inadvertency, in the course of often repeated transcriptions.

The actual amount and the importance of these corruptions of the text of ancient authors is likely to be overrated by general readers, who seeing that the subject is continually alluded to in critical works, and knowing that criticisms upon “various readings” often occupy a space five times exceeding that which is filled by the text, and that not seldom they become the subject of voluminous and angry controversies, are led to suppose that questions upon which the learned are so long and so seriously employed, cannot be otherwise than weighty and substantial. With a view of correcting this impression, so far as it may be erroneous, we shall now briefly explain the general nature, the causes, and the extent of these variations and corruptions.

By far the greater proportion of all “various readings”—perhaps nineteen out of twenty, are purely of a verbal kind, and they are such as can claim the attention of none but philologists and grammarians: a few may deserve the notice of every reader of ancient literature; and a few demand the consideration of the student of history. But, taken in a mass, the light in which they should be regarded is that of their furnishing a significant and conclusive proof of the care, fidelity, and exactness with which the business of copying was ordinarily conducted. For it is certain that nothing less than a high degree, as well of technical correctness, as of professional integrity, on the part of those who practised this craft, could have conveyed the text of ancient authors through a period—in some instances—of two thousand years, with alterations so trivial as are those which, for the most part, are found actually to have taken place.

When the discrepancies of manuscripts of an author are such as materially to affect the sense of a passage in itself important, so as to demand the exercise of discrimination on the part of the student of history, it becomes necessary to understand, and to bear in mind, what were probably the most common sources of such diversities. The following may be named as the most common causes of the various readings which are met with in comparing several copies of the same ancient author.

1. Nothing can be more probable than that authors who long survived the first publication of their works, should, from time to time, issue revised copies of them; and each of these altered copies would, if the work were in continual request, and were widely diffused, become the parent, as we may say, of a family of copies. Thus it would be that, without any fault on the part of the transcribers, a considerable amount of such diversities would be originated, and perpetuated. A large proportion, perhaps, of those variations which occupy the diligence and acumen of editors and critics, and for the rectification of which so many learned conjectures are often hazarded, have, in fact, arisen from the author’s own hand in revising the copies which, at intervals, he delivered to his amanuenses. The perpetual opportunity afforded for introducing corrections, when a book was continually in request, would not fail to encourage, in fastidious authors, the habit of frequent revision: meantime transcribers, in distant countries, might have no opportunity to collate the earlier with the later exemplars. This source of various readings seems to have been too little adverted to by critics; though it might serve to solve some perplexing questions relative to the genuineness of particular expressions or sentences, which have fallen under suspicion from their non-existence in certain manuscripts.

2. Some errors would, of course, arise from the mere inattention, carelessness, or the ignorance of transcribers; and yet fewer, probably, than may at first be imagined; for besides that those who spent their lives in this occupation would generally acquire a high degree of technical accuracy of eye, ear, and hand, and that correctness and legibility must have been the qualities upon which, principally, the marketable value of books depended; it is known that in the monasteries, from whence the greater part of all existing manuscripts proceeded, there were persons, qualified by their superior learning for the task, whose office it was to revise every book that issued from the Scriptorium. Errors of inadvertency must, nevertheless, have occurred. If the author to be transcribed was read by one person, while several wrote from his voice, the process would be open, not only to the mistakes of the reader’s eye, and to those of the writer’s hand; but especially to those of the writer’s ear; for words, similar in sound, might often be substituted, one for the other. Instances of this sort are of frequent occurrence, and the knowledge of the probable cause often serves to suggest the proper correction. If the writer read for himself, he would be liable to mistake letters of similar shape—to mistake the sense by a wrong division of words in his manner of reading, in consequence of which he might involuntarily accommodate the orthography or the syntax to the supposed sense. The frequent use of contractions in writing was a very common source of errors; for many of these abbreviations were extremely complicated, obscure, and ambiguous, so that an unskilful copyist was very likely to mistake one word for another. No parts of ancient books have suffered so much from errors of inadvertency as those which relate to numbers; for as one numeral letter was easily mistaken for another, and as neither the sense of the passage, nor the rules of orthography, nor of syntax, suggested the genuine reading, when once an error had arisen, it would most often be perpetuated, without remedy. It is, therefore, almost always unsafe to rest the stress of an argument upon any statement of numbers in ancient writers, unless some correlative computation confirms the reading of the text. Hence nothing can be more frivolous or unfair than to raise an objection against the veracity or accuracy of an historian, upon some apparent incompatibility in his statement of numbers. Difficulties of this sort it is much better to attribute, at once, to a corruption of the text, than to discuss them with ill-spent assiduity.

3. The assumption of short marginal notes into the text, appears to have been a frequent source of various readings. When such notes supplied ellipses in the author’s language, or when they conduced much to the perspicuity of an obscure passage, the copyist would be very likely to incorporate the exegetical phrase, rather than that it should either be lost to the reader, or should deform the margin.

4. Transcribers frequently thought themselves free to substitute modern for obsolete words or phrases; and sometimes they consulted the wishes of their customers, by exchanging the forms of one dialect (of the Greek) for those of another; or, more often, for the common forms of the language. Alterations of this kind have often been the occasion of bringing authentic works under needless suspicion; for when the text has contained words or phrases which are known to belong to a later age than that of the supposed author, such incongruities have seemed to afford proofs of spuriousness.

5. Intentional omissions, interpolations, or alterations, were unquestionably sometimes ventured on by transcribers. But so many are the means we possess for detecting any such wilful corruptions—drawn from a comparison of different manuscripts, or from the incongruity of the interpolated passage, that there is perhaps, altogether, more probability that, from some accidental peculiarity of style, genuine passages of ancient authors should fall under suspicion, than that any actually spurious portions should entirely escape suspicion and detection.

Of the above-mentioned sources of the various readings found in the text of ancient authors, it should be remembered that the operation of the first was confined to the short term of the author’s life; nor indeed, whatever may be the amount or importance of variations arising from this source, must they go to swell the number of corruptions of the text. The second source of variations was indeed open during the lapse of many centuries; yet it has always been held in check by the diligent collation of copies, on the part of industrious critics, from age to age: and a large proportion of errors, arising from mere inadvertency, are either so palpable as to suggest the means of their own correction; or they are so trivial as to merit no attention, except from those who charge themselves with the responsibilities of an editor. There is, besides, reason to believe that not a few existing copies of the most celebrated authors, present a text that has passed through the process of transcription not oftener than once or twice; and that each time the copy has been executed with scrupulous exactness. Variations arising from the third and fourth sources, have perhaps occasioned to critics and editors more perplexity than those springing from any other cause; and yet these differences are rarely of any moment, so far as the sense of the author is concerned: they can be deemed important only when they tend to perplex the question of the date or the genuineness of a book. Corruptions of the fifth class must be acknowledged materially to affect the credit and value of ancient literature, so far as there can be any reason to suspect their existence; and every diligent student of history will think the investigation of cases of this kind deserving of his utmost attention.

CHAPTER III.
THE DATE OF ANCIENT WORKS, INFERRED FROM THE QUOTATIONS AND REFERENCES OF CONTEMPORARY AND SUCCEEDING WRITERS.

Let us now suppose, that the Greek and Latin authors are extant only in the printed editions—that is to say, that every one of the ancient manuscripts has long since perished, and that the facts that have been referred to in the preceding pages are out of our view, or unknown. Our business then would be, to collect from these works such a series of mutual references, as should both prove the identity of the works now extant with those so referred to; and also fix the relative places of the several writers in point of time.

A single reference, found in one author, to the works of another, who, in his turn, needs the same kind of authentication, may seem to be a fallacious, or insufficient, and obscure kind of proof; for this reference or this quotation may possibly be an interpolation; or the reference may be of too slight or indefinite a kind to make it certain, that the work now extant is the same as that so referred to. In truth, the validity of this kind of proof arises from its amount, from its multifariousness, and from its incidental character. For although a single and solitary testimony may be inconclusive, many hundred independent testimonies, all bearing upon the same point, are much more than sufficient to remove every shadow of doubt; some of these references may be slight and indefinite, but others are full, particular, and complete. If some are formal and direct, and such therefore as might be supposed to have been inserted with a fraudulent design, others are altogether circuitous and purely incidental. If some have descended to us through the same channels, others are derived from sources as far removed as can be imagined from the possibility of collusion.

But a work may happen to want this kind of evidence, and yet, on other grounds, it may possess a valid claim to genuineness. In fact, almost all the existing remains of ancient literature are abundantly authenticated by the numerous and explicit quotations from them, or descriptions of them, that occur in other works. And there are very few books that do not contain some direct or some indirect allusions to other works: so it is that the remains of ancient literature, taken as a mass, contains within itself the proof of the authenticity of each part.

The nature of the case gives to this body of references a pyramidal form. In the most remote age it is, of course, small in amount; in the next age it becomes much more ample and substantial; and in later periods, it spreads itself over the entire surface of literature.

The literature of the Greeks was national and original; they borrowed from their neighbours less in poetry, philosophy, and history, than in religion, or the arts: their early writers were not, in the modern sense of the term, men of learning; their works were composed at the impulse of genius, and of the moving spirit of the times. The habit of literary allusion and quotation had not then been formed, nor indeed was it congruous with this order of intellectual production; and yet the early Greek writers contain mutual references, which, if not numerous, are sufficient to establish and ascertain, in most instances, the genuineness of each.

The second period of Greek literature, dating from the times of Alexander, and reaching down to the overthrow of the Greek national independence by the Romans, was, in the natural order of things, an era of learning, of criticism, and of imitation. The writers of this period, therefore, abound with references of all kinds to their predecessors and contemporaries. A second age of literature holds up a mirror of the first. Erudition, amplitude, comprehension, method, labour, take the place of spontaneous effort, and of intuitive taste. Commentators, compilers, and collectors abound; and the writers of such an age seem to perform the functions of caryatides in the temple of learning; as if their only business was to sustain the pediment which chiefly attracts the admiration of spectators. Among writers of this class, therefore, we are to look for a copious harvest of quotations; and in their pages we shall rarely fail to meet with evidence bearing upon any question of the genuineness of an ancient writer.

The Romans borrowed everything but energy of character and practical good sense, from the Greeks. Their literature, from the first, was of a derived character; their writers added learning to what might be their native genius; and their works reflect the literature of their masters. Sufficiently ample allusions, therefore, to the most celebrated of the Greek authors, as well as to those of their countrymen, are found scattered throughout the Latin classics.

Both the Greek and Latin writers of later ages were well acquainted with the literature of brighter times; and they have left in their works ample means for bringing down the chain of references to the time of the decline of learning in Europe—to that time up to which we have already traced the history of existing manuscripts; so that the two lines of evidence unite about midway between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries.

The nature, extent, and validity of the evidence that may be derived from the mutual references of authors, will be best exhibited by a classification of its several kinds under the following heads:—

1. Literal quotations, whether the author cited is named or not. Such quotations serve the double purpose of proving the existence of the work quoted in the time of the writer who makes the reference, and of identifying, and sometimes even of correcting, the extant text. If, for example, in subsequent writers, we find only a dozen or twenty sentences, taken from different parts of an earlier work, the verbal coincidence is sufficient to prove that the work, such as we now find it, is the same as that quoted. When such quotations are numerous and exact, they afford the best means, either of restoring the genuine reading of authors, or of judging of the comparative purity of different manuscripts. For frequently these quotations seem to have suffered less in the course of transcription than either the other parts of the work in which they are found, or than that from which they are taken. The reason of this difference may readily be imagined:—either the author himself quoted from a copy purer than any that are now extant; or the transcriber, meeting with a passage which he remembered to belong to a well-known work, consulted the original, of which he had a good copy, and the very circumstance of doing so would naturally induce somewhat more of care than in ordinary transcription.

2. Incidental allusions are often met with, either to the words or to the sense of an author, sufficiently obvious to prove that the one writer was known to the other; and yet they are too incidental and remote to be regarded as an interpolation. In questions of apparent difficulty, such accidental references may be conclusive in proof of the existence of a work at a certain time. Among the ancient historians, there are instances in which two writers, who do not mention each other, narrate the same facts with so many coincidences of method, or of details, embellishments, or reflections, as to make it certain either that both narratives were derived from the same source; or that the one was copied from the other. And if the one narrative has altogether the air of originality, and is in accordance with the writer’s style and spirit, the other writer must be held to be the quoting party, and therefore he establishes the prior existence of the work from which he has borrowed.

3. Nearly every one of the principal authors of antiquity has been explicitly mentioned, or criticised, or described, by later writers. Lists of their works have been given, with summaries of their contents; or they have been made the subjects of connected commentaries, by means of which the mass of the original work may be identified, and collated, with existing copies. Books of this secondary class are usually fraught with references to the entire circle of literature that was extant in the writer’s time. There are also extant several works containing the lives of ancient authors, with accurate lists of their works. These biographical pieces, while they have on one hand afforded a security against the production of spurious works, on the other hand have given occasion to such attempts; for if some treatise, known to have been written by a celebrated author, was believed to have perished, an opportunity was presented for composing one which should correspond with the description given of it. But such spurious works must always be deficient in positive evidence, nor will they fail to betray the imposition by some glaring inconsistencies in style, or in matter. The lives of statesmen and warriors often contain such allusions to the writers of the same age, as suffice to prove the time when they flourished. All the information we possess on this head is, in many instances, derived from allusions of this sort.

4. A copious fund of quotations is contained in some ancient treatises on particular subjects, in which all the authors who have handled the same topic are mentioned in the order of time.

5. Controversies, whether literary, political, or religious, have usually occasioned extensive quotations to be made from works of all classes; and, on the spur of an acrimonious disputation, many obscure facts have been adduced, which, by some circuitous connexion with other facts, have served to determine questions of literary history.

6. Among all the means for ascertaining the antiquity and genuineness of ancient books, none are more satisfactory or more complete than those afforded by the existence of early translations. Indeed, if such translations can be proved to have been made near to the time at which the author of the original work is believed to have lived, and if they correspond, in the main, with the existing text—and if they have descended to modern times through channels altogether independent of those which have conveyed the original work—and if, moreover, ancient translations of the same work, in several languages, are in existence, no kind of proof can be more perfect, or more trustworthy. In such cases every other evidence might safely be dispensed with. Ancient translations serve also the important purpose of furnishing a criterion by which to judge of the comparative merits of manuscripts, and by which also to determine questions of suspected interpolation.

Although the genuineness of by far the greater part of ancient literature is established by a redundancy of testimonies, such as those here described, there will of course be some few instances of works which, though probably genuine, are so destitute of external proof that they must remain under doubt; and there are also some few which, though probably spurious, possess just so much plausible proof of genuineness as serves to maintain a place for them on the ground of controversy. The two together, therefore, will yield some number of disputable cases. The controversies that have actually been carried on relative to such doubtful works have served to show the exceedingly small chance which any actually spurious work can have of escaping suspicion and detection. And thus these discussions furnish, implicitly, the strongest grounds for relying upon the genuineness of those works against which even a captious and whimsical scepticism can maintain no plausible objection.

CHAPTER IV.
THE ANTIQUITY AND GENUINENESS OF ANCIENT BOOKS MAY BE INFERRED FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGES IN WHICH THEY ARE EXTANT.

A language is at once the most complete, and it is the least fallible of all historical records. A poem or a history may have been forged; but a language is an unquestionable reality. The bare circumstance of its existence, though it may long have ceased to be colloquially extant, proves, in substance, what it is which history has to communicate. If we did but possess a complete vocabulary of an ancient language, and if we were to digest the mass in accordance with an exact principle of synthesis, we should frame a model of the people that once used it—a model more perfect than any other monuments can furnish: and on this ground we need fear no falsifications, no concealments, no flatteries, no exaggerations. The precise extent of knowledge and of civilisation to which a people attained—nothing more and nothing less, is marked out in the mass of words of which they were accustomed to make use.

A language, if the comparison may be admitted, might be called a cast of the people who spoke it—a cast, taken from the very life; and it is one which represents the world of mind, as well as the world of matter. The common objects of nature—the peculiarities of climate—the works of art—the details of domestic life—political institutions—religious opinions and observances—philosophy, poetry, and art—every form and hue of the external world, and every modification of thought, find their representatives in the language of the people.

In any case, therefore, if we have a complete knowledge of a language—that is to say, of the words of which it consists—we possess a mass of facts by aid of which to judge of the claims to authenticity of every work in which that language is embodied. And if, in addition to a knowledge of its vocabulary, the laws of its construction also, and the nicest proprieties of its syntax and style are known; and if, moreover, the changes that have taken place from age to age in the sense of words, and in modes of expression, are understood, we then possess ample and exact data with which to compare any book that pretends to antiquity. A writer who employs his native language must be expected to conform himself to its usages; and we should find him adhering, more or less strictly, to the peculiarities of the age in which he writes: his vocabulary, moreover, will include that compass of words which his subject demands, and which the language affords.

It is true that such a degree of skill in a dead language may be acquired as may enable a writer to use it with so exact a propriety as shall deceive, or at least perplex, even the most accomplished scholars. But the difficulty of avoiding every phrase of later origin, and all modern senses of those words which are continually passing from a literal to a metaphorical meaning, is so great, as to leave the chances of escaping detection extremely small. Yet, as such a chance still remains within the range of possibility, this line of evidence cannot be reckoned absolutely conclusive, but must only be employed as subsidiary to those other evidences that bear upon questions of authenticity.

The minute changes which are continually taking place in most languages, and the history of which, when known, serves often to ascertain the date of ancient books, are of two kinds; namely, those which result necessarily from actual changes in the objects represented by words, and those which are mere changes in the use and proprieties of language itself.

Language being a mirror, reflecting all the communicable notions of the people who use it, every mutation in the condition of the people must bring with it, either new terms, or new combinations of words; and as the particular circumstances which introduce such additions or alterations are often known, their occurrence in an author may serve to fix the date of the book, almost with certainty.

Moreover, there is a progression in language itself, independent of any alterations in the objects represented by words. Whenever a vocabulary affords a choice of appellatives, even for immutable objects or notions, the caprices of conversation or of literature—affectation perhaps, or excessive refinement, will, from time to time, occasion a new selection to be made. In all those terms, especially, which either bring with them ideas too familiar to accord with the proprieties of an elevated style, or which are in any degree offensive to delicacy, there will take place a continual, and, sometimes, even a rapid, substitution of new for old phrases—not because the new are in themselves more dignified, or more pure than the old; but because, when first introduced, they are untainted by gross associations or vulgar use.

Every language, therefore, copious specimens of which are extant, and of which the progress is known, contains a latent history of the people through whose lips it has passed, and furnishes to the scholar a series of recondite dates, by means of which literary remains may almost with certainty be assigned to their proper age. This sort of evidence bears the same relation to the history of books, which that derived from the successive changes known to have taken place in the mode of writing bears to the history of manuscripts. It is of a subsidiary kind, and from its very indirectness it often deserves peculiar attention.

We have now seen on what grounds it is, generally, that with reasonable confidence the extant works of ancient authors may be accepted as being such in truth. In presenting this statement of the case, nothing more has been attempted than to offer an outline or brief summary of the argument before us. Certain parts of this argument, as the reader will at once perceive, would admit of much amplification; and in any instance in which the genuineness of a particular manuscript, or the authenticity of an ancient work were alleged to be questionable, every part of the evidence would require to be brought forward in all its details, and to be narrowly scrutinized.

CHAPTER V.
ANCIENT METHODS OF WRITING, AND THE MATERIALS OF BOOKS.

As our present inquiry relates to Books, it will not be expected to include anything concerning ancient methods of engraving inscriptions upon marbles, metals, or precious stones. Yet it should be remembered that a knowledge of inscriptions is often highly important, as furnishing subsidiary and independent means of determining the age of manuscripts, as indicated by the character of the writing. For as there are extant almost innumerable specimens of writing upon the more durable materials, and as these specimens belong to every age from the very earliest times, and as such inscriptions usually contain, either an explicit date, or some allusion to public persons or events, they serve to determine, beyond doubt, the successive changes that have taken place in the form of letters, and in the modes of writing.

MATERIALS OF ANCIENT BOOKS.

No material for books has, perhaps, a higher claim to antiquity than the skin of the calf or goat, tanned soft, and which usually was dyed red or yellow: the skins, when thus prepared, were most often connected in lengths, sometimes of a hundred feet, sufficient to contain an entire work; or one book of a history or treatise, which then formed a roll, or volume. These soft skins seem to have been more in use among the Jews and other Asiatics than among the people of Europe. The copies of the Hebrew Scriptures, found in the synagogues of the Jews, are often of this kind: the most ancient manuscripts extant are some copies of the Pentateuch, on rolls of crimson leather.

Parchment—Pergamena, so called long after the time of its first use, from Pergamus, a city of Mysia, where the manufacture was improved and carried on to a great extent, is mentioned by Herodotus and Ctesias, as a material which had been from time immemorial used for books. It has proved itself to be, of all others, except that above mentioned, the most durable. The greater part of all those manuscripts, now in our hands, that are of higher antiquity than the sixth century, are on parchment; as well as, generally, all carefully written, and curiously decorated manuscripts, of later times. The palimpsests, mentioned in a preceding chapter, are usually parchments.

The practice, which is still followed in the East, of writing upon the leaves of trees, is of great antiquity. The leaves of the mallow, or of the palm, were those the most used for this purpose; sometimes they were wrought together so as to form larger surfaces; but it is probable that so fragile and inconvenient a material was employed rather for ordinary purposes of business, letter-writing, and the instruction of children, than for books, intended for preservation.

The inner bark of the linden or teil tree, and perhaps of some others, called by the Romans Liber, by the Greeks Biblos, was so generally used as a material for writing, as to have given its name to a book, in both languages. Tables of solid wood called codices—whence the term codex, for a manuscript, on any material, has passed into common use—were also employed; but this was chiefly for legal documents, on which account a system of laws came to be called—a Code. Leaves or tablets of lead, or of ivory, are frequently mentioned by ancient authors as in common use for writing. But no material or preparation seems to have been so frequently employed, on ordinary occasions, as tablets covered with a thin coat of coloured wax, which might be readily removed by an iron needle, called a style; and from which the writing was as easily effaced, by applying the blunt end of the same instrument.

But during many ages the article most in use, and of which the consumption was so great as to form a principal branch of the commerce of the Mediterranean, was that which was manufactured from the papyrus of Egypt. Many manuscripts written upon this kind of paper in the sixth, and some even so early as the fourth century, are still extant. It formed the material of by far the larger proportion of all books from very early times till about the seventh or eighth century, when it gradually gave place to a still more convenient manufacture—our modern paper.

The papyrus, or reed of Egypt, grew in vast quantities in the stagnant pools that were formed by the annual inundations of the Nile. The plant consists of a single stem, rising sometimes to the height of ten cubits: this stem, gradually tapering from the root, supports a spreading tuft at its summit. The substance of the stem is fibrous, and the pith contains a sweet juice. Every part of this plant was put to some use by the Egyptians—so ingenious and so industrious as they were. The harder and lower part they formed into cups and other utensils; the upper part into staves, or the ribs of boats: the sweet pith was a common article of food; while the fibrous part of the stem was manufactured into cloth, sails for ships, ropes, strings, shoes, baskets, wicks for lamps, and, especially, into paper. For this purpose the fibrous coats of the plant were peeled off, throughout the whole length of the stem. One layer of fibres was then laid across another upon a block, and being moistened, the glutinous juice of the plant formed a cement, sufficiently strong to give coherence to the fibres; when greater solidity was required, a size made from bread or glue was employed. The two films being thus connected, were pressed, dried in the sun, beaten with a broad mallet, and then polished with a shell. This texture was cut into various sizes, according to the use for which it was intended, varying from thirteen, to four fingers’ breadth, and of proportionate length.

By progressive improvements, which were made especially when the manufacture came into the hands of the Roman artists, this Egyptian paper was at length brought to a high degree of perfection. In later ages it was made of considerable thickness—perfect whiteness, and an entire continuity and smoothness of surface. Nevertheless, it was, at the best, so friable, that when durability was required, the copyists inserted a page of parchment between every five or six pages of the papyrus. Thus the firmness of the one substance defended the brittleness of the other; and great numbers of books, constituted in this manner, have resisted the accidents and decays of twelve centuries.

Three hundred years before the Christian era, the commerce in the paper of Egypt had extended over most parts of the civilised world; and long afterwards it continued to be a principal source of wealth to the Egyptians. But at length the invention of another material, and also that interruption of commerce which ensued in consequence of the conquest of Egypt by the Saracens, banished the Egyptian paper from common use. Comparatively few manuscripts on this material are found of later date than the eighth or ninth century; although it continued to be occasionally used long afterwards.

The charta bombycina, or cotton paper, which has often improperly been called silk paper, had unquestionably been manufactured in the East as early as the ninth century, and probably much earlier; and in the tenth century it came into general use throughout Europe. Not long afterwards, this invention was made still more available for general purposes by the substitution of old linen, or cotton rags, for the raw material; for by this means both the price of the article was reduced, and its quality greatly improved. The cotton paper manufactured in the ancient mode is still used in the East, and is a beautiful fabric; it is also extensively used in the United States.

From this account of the materials successively employed for books, it will be obvious, that a knowledge of the changes which these several manufactures underwent from age to age, will often make it easy, and especially when employed in subservience to other evidence, to fix with certainty the date of manuscripts; or at the least, to furnish infallible means for detecting fabricated documents.

The preservation of books, framed as they are of materials so destructible, through a period of twelve, or even fifteen hundred years, is a fact which might seem almost incredible; especially so as the decay of far more durable substances, within a much shorter period, is continually presented to our notice. Yet so it is, that while the massive walls of the monasteries of the middle ages are often seen prostrate, and their materials fast mingling with the soil, the manuscripts, penned within them, or perhaps at a time when these stones were yet in the quarry, are still fair and perfect, and glitter with their gold and silver, their cerulean and their cinnabar.

It must be remembered, however, that the materials of books, although destructible, are so far from being in themselves perishable, that so long as they are defended from positive injuries, they appear to suffer scarcely at all from any intrinsic principle of decay, or to be liable to any perceptible process of chemical decomposition. No one, says Mabillon, unless totally unacquainted with what relates to antiquity, can call in question the great durability of parchments; since there are extant innumerable books, written on that material, in the seventh and sixth centuries; and some of a still more remote antiquity, by which all doubt on that subject might be removed. It may suffice here to mention the Virgil of the Vatican Library, which appears to be of more ancient date than the fourth century; and another in the King’s Library little less ancient: also the Prudentius, in the same library, of equal age; to which you may add several, already mentioned, as the Psalter of S. Germanus, the Book of the Councils, and others, which are all of parchment.

The paper of Egypt, being more frail and brittle, might be open to greater doubt; and yet there are books of great antiquity, by which its durability may be established.

Books have owed their conservation, not merely to the durability of the material of which they were formed; but to the peculiarity of their being, at once precious, and yet (in periods of general ignorance) not marketable articles; they were of inestimable value to a few, while absolutely worthless in the opinion of the multitude. They were also often indebted for their preservation, in periods of disorder and violence, to the sacredness of the roofs under which they were lodged.

THE INSTRUMENTS OF WRITING, AND INKS.

The instruments used for writing would, of course, be such as were adapted to the material on which they were to be employed. For writing upon the brazen, leaden, or waxed tablets, above mentioned, a needle, called a style, was used, the upper end of which, being smooth and flat, served to obliterate the marks on the tablet, as occasion might require. These styles were at first most often formed of iron or brass; but afterwards of ivory, bone, or wood. Indeed a fatal use having been, on several occasions, made of these pointed weapons by angry partisans in the public courts, the use of iron styles was prohibited; Cæsar, when attacked by the conspirators, is said to have used his iron style as a dagger, and with it to have pierced the arm of one of them: and the story of the Christian schoolmaster, Cassianus, is well known, who is said to have been killed by his scholars, armed with their styles: other similar instances are recorded.

For the purpose of writing with fluid ink, a calamus, formed generally from a reed of the Nile, was used. Persons of distinction often wrote with a calamus of silver. The use of quills seems to have been of ancient date; but long after the time when the fitness of the quill for the purpose of writing had become known, the calamus of reed continued to be preferred. The scalpel, or knife employed for trimming the pen, the compasses, for measuring the distances of the lines, and the scissars, for cutting the paper, are always seen on the desk of the writers in the decorations attached to many ancient manuscripts.

The ink most used by the ancients has been said, but on rather uncertain authority, to have consisted of the black liquor found in the cuttle fish. But it has been proved by chemical analysis that an opaque ink, very different from the mere dye or stain used at present, was commonly employed by the transcribers of books. This opaque ink seems, like the China ink, to have been formed from the finest soot of lamps, in which the purest combustibles were burnt. The coal of ivory, or of the finer woods, powdered, was also in use; these or similar substances, mixed with gums, and diluted with acids, formed a pigment that was much more durable than our modern ink; but it was also far less fluent, and therefore less adapted to a rapid and continuous movement of the pen.

The ink, says Montfaucon, which we see in the most ancient Greek manuscripts, has evidently lost much of its pristine blackness; yet neither has it become altogether yellow or faint, but is rather tawny or deep red, and often is not far from a vermilion. This appears in many manuscripts of the fourth and following centuries. Yet there are some written with an ink more skilfully composed, which have preserved their first blackness. It has happened also, when the surface of the parchment, instead of being polished, was spongy, that the ink has become yellow. In all the bombycine manuscripts, owing to the nature of the material, a separation of the parts of the ink has taken place; the grosser part standing on the surface, while the finer has penetrated the substance of the paper.

Inks of various colours, especially red, purple, and blue, and also gold and silver inks, were much used by the ancients: few manuscripts are destitute of some such ornamental diversities of colour; and many are splendidly recommended to the eye by these means. There was a purple ink, which was appropriated to the use of the emperors, and was called the sacred encaustic; but a dye, not easily distinguished from that which appears upon some imperial charters, is very commonly found in ancient books. And it is said that they must have had a nice sight who could so distinguish between the two as to have detected a violation of the law on this subject. The subscription commonly seen at the end of Greek manuscripts, containing the name of the transcriber, with the year, month, day, indiction, and sometimes the hour when the copy was finished, are most often written in the imperial colour, especially in the times of the lower empire; or if not in that ink, in one that cannot now be distinguished from it.

The titles of chapters were frequently written alternately in red and cerulean: marginal notes, most often in the latter colour. Books of a later date often have all the capitals of a bright green. The Greeks, more frequently than the Romans, used golden ink; and many Greek manuscripts are extant in which, not the titles and capitals only, but whole pages, are elegantly written in a pigment of the precious metals: but it was rather upon ecclesiastical than profane literature that this honour was bestowed. The works of the Fathers, chiefly, were so adorned, and sometimes the Gospels: there is extant a copy of the four Evangelists, written upon purple parchment, in letters of gold throughout. The practice of using gold and silver inks was so common, that the manufacture of them became a distinct business; and those who were skilled in this sort of writing seldom followed any other employment than that of inserting the titles, capitals, or emphatic words, in copies that had been executed by inferior hands. Several curious recipes for the preparation of the precious pigments are given by the later Greek waiters.

Those who have been long accustomed to inspect and examine ancient manuscripts acquire a certain tact in judging of the age of a book from the condition of the ink, its colour and composition, which cannot be explained to others, and for the exercise of which no rules can be laid down. But in cases where a fraud is suspected, this nice habit of the eye often detects at once the imposition. It is perhaps more practicable to give to a picture, than to a manuscript, the hue of antiquity by artificial means.

CHAPTER VI.
CHANGES INTRODUCED IN THE COURSE OF TIME IN THE FORMS OF LETTERS, AND IN THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF WRITING.

An exact uniformity in the shapes of letters, and in the general appearance of writing, is hardly maintained for so long a period as fifty years in any language, especially if it be widely diffused. Within that space of time, the fashion of our own typography has undergone several changes, so perceptible as to afford a tolerably certain criterion of the date of books. No person, for example, who is familiar with books, would find it difficult, merely from the character of the type, to discriminate the age of works published at the several periods of 1775, 1800, 1825, and 1855. On similar grounds a knowledge of the successive changes introduced by caprice, accident, or a regard to convenience, in the ancient modes of writing, affords an almost certain means of determining the age of manuscripts.

The knowledge requisite for the exercise of this discrimination is derived, in part, from incidental allusions to modes of writing which occur in some ancient authors; but principally from an extensive comparison of manuscripts themselves, and from a comparison of manuscripts with inscriptions upon marbles, brazen tablets, or coins. From these sources may be collected a sufficiently precise idea of the character or fashion of writing prevailing in each century, from the second, to the fifteenth, of the Christian era.

The oldest Greek manuscripts that are extant differ little in the form of the letters, or the general appearance of the writing, from inscriptions belonging to the corresponding periods. They are written in capitals, called uncials, without division of words, and without marks of accentuation or punctuation. About the seventh century, the custom of affixing the accents and aspirates appears to have been introduced; at the same time a greater degree of precision was observed in the formation of the letters, and also in the directness and the parallelism of the lines. To these improvements was added a change in the form of those letters which most impeded the rapid movement of the pen.

In the eighth and ninth centuries a mode of writing, which had been long before practised by notaries and by the secretaries of public persons, was adopted by the transcribers of books. This was a kind of running-hand, those who invented, or who most used it, being called tachygraphoi—swift writers. To adapt the Greek letters to the purpose of public business and common life, the square forms had been changed for curves, and uprights for slopes: and while a radical resemblance to the primitive character was preserved, facility and freedom were obtained.

The uncial character was not, however, altogether abandoned by the copyists; but modifications of it were introduced with a view to obtain greater facility: for the unconnected and upright squares formerly used, seemed still more operose in execution after the running-hand had been adopted. The copyists of the eighth century introduced the practice of commencing books or chapters with a letter of large size, which they usually distinguished by grotesque decorations, somewhat in the manner seen in the printed books of the sixteenth century.

Those who gained their living by copying books found so great an advantage in the adoption of the swift, or tachygraphic character, that they presently sought to improve it by every device that might favour the uninterrupted movement of the pen; not content with joining the letters of each word, they combined them in forms that often bore little or no resemblance to the component characters. The books of the tenth and following centuries abound with these contractions, abbreviations, and symbols. Many entire words of common occurrence were indicated by single turns of the pen. A great part of these contractions were adopted by the first printers, and many of them continued in use until a very recent date.

The manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are distinguished by a degeneracy in the mode of writing, and by a growing abuse of the principle of celerity and facility. To these symptoms of the influence of a mercantile motive, put into activity by an increasing demand for books, may be added the practice of discharging the writing of old parchments, which prevailed at the same period more extensively than heretofore. A vast number of books of this sort, written upon erased parchments, are to be met with, executed in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. In most instances, the first writing is utterly obliterated; yet the marks of the erasure are still evident. Thus in a MS. above described, not a letter, not a point, of the ancient writing remains; but on many of the leaves may be discerned ruled lines, either transverse or perpendicular, which having been deeply impressed upon the parchment could not be effaced; so that those old lines often crossed the new writing. Other pages of the same MS. present no such indications; the leaves having probably been taken from different books. In another MS., executed in the year 1186, though the ancient writing is generally obliterated, yet in a few places, if closely inspected, the ends of the letters may be perceived. In a word, if all the books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are examined, there will appear to be almost as many written upon erased, as upon new parchments.[1] I am of opinion, that many authors extant in the time of Photius, and even in that of Porphyrogenitus, were utterly destroyed by the prevalence of this pernicious practice. This plague, as it may be termed, spread its devastation among ancient books first in the twelfth century, and continued its ravages during the thirteenth and fourteenth. The same thing is rarely to be observed in bombycine manuscripts: I have met with one book only of this material in which the first writing had been erased, and a second induced. The Greek writers of these times ordinarily erased a better work for the sake of substituting a worse; either one of their own inane productions, or those works of which there is no scarcity among MSS. The extremest ignorance must certainly have pervaded Greece in those times, when what related to ancient history, or to polite learning, was not valued a straw by the writers, who rather than purchase new parchment, destroyed, without scruple, ancient books.

A progression similar to that which took place in Greek writing, distinguishes manuscripts in the Latin language, and affords a like criterion of antiquity. Several manuscripts believed, on good evidence, to belong to the third and fourth centuries, are extant, which present a style of writing nearly allied to that which appears in the inscriptions of the same period. But the uncial character gave place to the small letter at an earlier date among the Roman, than among the Greek copyists; yet they seem to have availed themselves of the change in a much less degree for the purposes of celerity. Indeed, there is little more of continuity, or of abbreviation in the small, than in the large character. Towards the tenth century the Latin scribes adopted a square and heavy character, similar to that which is seen in legal documents. This wide and full-faced letter was so much exaggerated by the writers of the fourteenth century, as almost to blacken the page with its massiveness. Still, a handsome regularity and a fair degree of legibility were maintained. There are, indeed, some manuscripts of this period extant which, for mathematical exactness and beauty, might almost challenge comparison with printed books.

Nothing less, it is obvious, than a long-continued and extensive examination of ancient manuscripts, can confer upon any one such a degree of skill in discriminations of this kind, as might warrant his giving an opinion in a case of difficulty. Yet the mere inspection of a small number of these relics of antiquity may convince any one of the reality and distinctness of those progressive changes in the modes of writing upon which such discriminations are founded. The architecture of different periods is not more characteristic of the age to which it belongs, than is the style of writing in manuscripts; nor is there less certainty in determining questions of antiquity in the one case, than in the other. Particular instances may perplex or deceive the best-informed and the most acute observers; but the greater number of cases admit of no question.

FORM OF ANCIENT BOOKS, AND THEIR ILLUMINATIONS.

The mode of compacting the sheets of their books remained the same among the Greeks during a long course of time: little, therefore, pertinent to our argument, is to be gathered on this head. The sheets were folded three or four together, and separately stitched: these parcels were then connected nearly in the same mode as is at present practised. Books were covered with linen, silk, or leather.

Sometimes the page was undivided; sometimes it contained two, and in a few instances of very ancient manuscripts, three columns. A peculiarity which attracts the eye in many Greek manuscripts, consists in the occurrence of capitals on the margin, some way in advance of the line to which they belong; and this capital sometimes happens to be the middle letter of a word. For when a sentence finishes in the middle of a line, the initial of the next is not distinguished, that honour being conferred upon the incipient letter of the next line; as thus—

The Greeks, especially in the earliest times, divided their compositions into verses; or into such short portions of sentences as we mark by a comma, each verse occupying a line; and the number of these verses is often set down at the beginning or end of a book. The numbers of the verses were sometimes placed in the margin.

Much intricacy and difficulty attends the subject of ancient punctuation; nor could any satisfactory account of the rules and exceptions that have been gathered from existing manuscripts be given, which should subserve the intention of this work. Generally speaking, and yet with frequent exceptions, the most ancient books have no separation of words, or punctuation, of any kind; others have a separation of words, but no punctuation; in some, every word is separated from the following one by a point. In manuscripts of later date a regular punctuation is found, as well as accentuation. These circumstances enter into the estimate when the antiquity of a book is under inquiry; but the rules to be observed in considering them cannot be otherwise than recondite and intricate.

Few ancient books are altogether destitute of decorations; and many are splendidly adorned with pictorial ornaments. These consist either of flowery initials, grotesque cyphers, portraits, or even historical compositions. Sometimes diagrams, explanatory of the subjects mentioned by the author, are placed on the margin. Books written for the use of royal persons, or of dignified ecclesiastics, usually contain the effigies of the proprietor, often attended by his family, and by some allegorical or celestial minister; while the humble scribe, in monkish attire, kneels and presents the book to his patron.

These illuminations, as they are called, almost always exhibit some costume of the times, or some peculiarity which serves to mark the age of the manuscript. Indeed a fund of antiquarian information, relative to the middle ages, has been collected from this source. Many of these pictured books exhibit a high degree of executive talent in the artist, although labouring under the restraints of a barbarous taste.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Montfaucon.

CHAPTER VII.
THE COPYISTS; AND THE PRINCIPAL CENTRES OF THE COPYING BUSINESS.

It is a matter of some importance to know by what class of persons, chiefly, the business of copying books was practised; and it gives no little support to our confidence in the genuineness of existing manuscripts, to find that individuals of all ranks, influenced by very different motives, were accustomed to devote themselves to this employment. From the earliest times in which literature flourished, there were, in all the principal cities of Greece and its colonies, great numbers of professional scribes; that is to say, persons who gained their subsistence by copying books. Labourers of this class, it may well be supposed, aimed, in general, at nothing but to gain custom by the fairness and the fidelity of their copies. But it appears to have been not uncommon for persons of rank and leisure to occupy themselves in this employment. Thus it is that in the list of copyists we find the names of the nobles of the Constantinopolitan empire. Some created their libraries for themselves by transcribing every book that came in their way. To persons of a sedate temper, or who by indisposition were confined to their homes, this occupation may be imagined to have been highly agreeable. Nor was it a wasted labour to those who had leisure at command; since the high price of books made the collection of a library, by purchase, scarcely practicable, except to the most opulent.

The influence of Christianity very greatly extended the practice of private copying; for motives of piety operated to stimulate the industry of very many in the good work of multiplying the sacred books, and the works of Christian writers. The highest dignitaries of the Church, and princes even, thought themselves well employed in transcribing the Gospels and Epistles, the Psalter, or the homilies or meditations of the Fathers; nor were the classic authors, as we shall see, entirely neglected by these gratuitous copyists.

But from the third or fourth century downwards, the religious houses were the chief sources of books, and the monks were almost the only copyists. The employment was better suited than any other that can be imagined, to the rules, and usages, and to the modes of feeling peculiar to the monastic life. The mental and bodily inertness which the spirit and rules of the conventual orders tended to produce, when conjoined, in individuals, with some measure of native industry, would find precisely a field for that lethargic assiduity which it needed, in the business of copying books. In many monasteries this employment formed the chief occupation of the inmates; and by few was it altogether neglected.

Various appellations occur in the Greek authors, by which the several orders of writers were designated. Among the scribes or notaries attached to the service of public persons, there were always some who were eminent for the rapidity with which they wrote, and who therefore bore the title of tachygraphoi, or “swift writers.” But those who followed the business of copying books, in which legibility was the chief excellence, generally called themselves kalligraphoi, or “fair writers.” Yet these appellations are often used interchangeably.

The copyists usually subscribed their names at the end of every book, with the year in which it was executed: to which they often added the name of the reigning emperor; sometimes, though rarely, the name of the patriarch of Constantinople, for the time being, is added to the subscription of the copyist. Manuscripts written in Sicily, bear the name of its kings; those executed in the East, mention the Arabian or Turkish princes. The Greeks of the early ages commonly dated from the creation of the world, which they placed 5508 years before Christ. Sometimes they reckoned time from the death of Alexander the Great; sometimes from the accession of Philip Aridæus; sometimes from the accession of Diocletian; and, occasionally, they give some notice of the signal events of their times. From these incidental references much important historical information has often been collected. These signatures are usually written by the hand of the transcriber of the book.

Besides the signature of the copyist, the margins of many manuscripts contain notes—often very trivial or absurd, from the hands of successive proprietors of the book; each accompanied with some date or reference to persons or events, serving to fix the time of the annotator, and, by inference, proving the antiquity of the manuscript. In a few instances the transcribers copied the subscription of the transcribers of the book from which they wrote; and if that former subscription bears a date, we have a double indication of antiquity.

The fidelity of the copyists, and the genuineness and integrity of ancient manuscripts, have been warmly and learnedly defended by the laborious Father Mabillon, on every occasion throughout his great work, De Re Diplomatica.[2] The leading motive which impelled the indefatigable author to the prosecution of the researches of which this work gives the result, seems to have been the desire to establish the genuineness and integrity of ecclesiastical, and especially of monastic charters. In the course of his inquiries, he brings forward a vast variety and amount of information relating to the modes of writing practised in the monasteries, and in the courts of the French kings, during the middle ages. These facts are of course most available in arguments that relate to the genuineness and antiquity of existing manuscripts in the Latin language; but there is so much of the substance of the argument touching the genuineness of all ancient writings in the following passages, that they may well be placed before the reader. The work itself is little likely to come under the eye of those for whom this volume is intended.

This learned writer says:—“Before I conclude this supplement, I think it may be proper to say something concerning the integrity and authority of ancient books, which some persons dispute. For assuredly, if the genuineness of charters and public deeds is doubted, the authority of ancient manuscripts in general is also called in question; and, if these doubts can be substantiated, it will appear that those who employ themselves in collating the printed editions of the Fathers, or other sacred books, with ancient manuscripts, spend their labour in vain. And hence, too, we must believe, contrary to the opinion of all learned persons, who think the world greatly indebted to the labours of the monks in transcribing books, that they toiled to no good purpose. Such persons, to give colour to their opinion, affirm that the existing ancient manuscripts were executed by ignorant men, whose blunders are easily perceived by the learned; and on this prejudice they have founded the decision, that manuscripts having been written, for the most part, by unskilful hands, and derived many from one, are of little avail in understanding or restoring an author.

“But if this principle were admitted, our confidence in the printed editions, as well as in the ancient manuscripts, must fall to the ground. Neither the acts of councils, the works of the Fathers, nor the Holy Scriptures, would retain any authority. For whence, I ask, proceeded the printed editions, both of profane and sacred writers? were they not derived from ancient manuscripts? If, therefore, these are of no authority, those can have none; and thus, by this paradoxical opinion, the foundations, both of literature and of religion, are torn up. And, on this principle, there would be no force in the argument used by St. Augustine against the Manichæans, who calumniously affirmed every place of Holy Scripture, by which their errors might be confuted, to be falsified and corrupted. But Augustine, in reply to Faustus, reminds him that whoever had first attempted such a corruption of the Scriptures, would have immediately been confuted by a multitude of ancient manuscripts, which were in the hands of all Christians.

“On this principle the labours of the Fathers, Jerome, Augustine, and others, in collating ancient books with modern copies, would have been fruitless. In vain the appeals of councils to such authorities for the determination of controversies; in vain the costs and cares of princes and kings in collecting manuscripts from the remotest countries. And if the case be thus, the Vatican, the Florentine, the Ambrosian, and the royal (French) libraries are nothing better than useless heaps of parchment. And it was to no purpose that the Roman pontiffs and the kings of France, as well as other prelates and princes, sent learned men to the farthest parts of the East to obtain ancient books in the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and other languages. And then the ancient transcribers must lose their credit, and especially the monks, who devoted themselves entirely to the copying of books; such were the disciples of St. Martin, among whom, according to Sulpicius, no art but that of writing was practised. For they thought they could not be better employed than while at once edifying themselves in the continual perusal of the Holy Scriptures, and spreading the precepts of the Lord far and wide by their pens. Of this opinion was the pious Guigo: ‘As we cannot preach the word with our lips,’ says he, ‘let us do it with our hands; for as many books as we transcribe, so many heralds of the truth do we send forth.’ And thus also Peter the venerable, writing to Gislebert, a recluse, exhorts him to diligence in this exercise: ‘For so you may become a silent preacher of the Divine Word; and though your tongue be mute, your hand will speak aloud in the ears of many people. And in future times, after your death, the fruit of your toils will remain, even as long as these books shall endure.’

“If it is affirmed that the manuscripts we possess were, for the most part, written by unlearned persons; are they therefore undeserving of regard? In the first place, I deny that they were generally written by the unlearned. Certainly the blessed martyr Pamphilus, who wrote out the greater part of the works of Origen, was not unlearned; nor was Jerome unlearned, nor Hilarius. Of Fulgentius, the celebrated bishop (of Ruspa), it is reported that he was famed for his skill in the writer’s art. The same praise was earned by those holy men Lucianus, Philoromus, and Marcellus; also by the blessed Plato and Theophanus. The blessed Marcella the younger, as says Jerome, wrote quickly and without fault. The venerable Bede, Radbert, Raban and others among our learned men, discharged the function of copyists, not of their own works only, but of those of others.

“And even if the greater part of manuscripts were written by unlearned men, they are not therefore to be accounted unskilful copyists, provided they read and copied accurately. Experience proves every day that those compositors are not the most correct who understand Latin, but that such are commonly the most faulty; especially in attempting to correct that which they do not properly understand, and which those who know nothing of the language set up accurately. But let it be granted that the copyists were unlearned: we know that the printed editions are not derived from a single copy, but from a comparison of many: the most careless scribe does not always err, and where he does, his mistakes are amended by the collation of the copies of others.

“In a word, there were in all well-ordered churches and monasteries, not only learned writers who transcribed books themselves, but learned correctors, who compared the copies made by others with the originals, and amended whatever was erroneous. A devoted scribe, says Trithemius, when he has carefully written a book, compares it anew with the original, and subjects it to a diligent revision. Many instances might be adduced in proof of this revision and correction of manuscripts. One or two may suffice. In the library of the Vatican there is a manuscript written towards the close of the fifth, or in the beginning of the sixth century, containing the books of St. Hilary on the Trinity, which has been collated with an older copy by some studious person, as appears by a note at the end. Again, Paul Warnefrid, deacon and monk of Casina, having copied the epistles of Gregory the Great, sent the book to Adalhard, abbot of Corbeia, requesting him to revise the copy; but the abbot, fearing lest he might alter the genuine text of so learned a doctor, contented himself with placing a mark in the margin at every place where there appeared to him to be an error.

“But it is affirmed that there are many faulty, and many falsified manuscripts. That there are not a few faulty books I grant; but that there are many falsified manuscripts I stoutly deny. The difference between a faulty and a falsified book is essential: of the former sort are those which, from the mistakes or negligence of the writer, contain some blemishes: of the latter kind are those which have been wilfully corrupted. Many, indeed, may appear to be falsified which are not so really, nor are even faulty. Which I may thus explain.—It could not but happen that the copyists, in transcribing large works, should sometimes wander from the true reading—putting perhaps one word for another. When they observed their error, they might rectify it in two ways, either by erasing the word and inserting the genuine reading; or by inserting the true word beneath the other, which they marked with points. Now some persons, not understanding this, or purposely putting upon it an unfavourable construction, found upon the first case a charge of erasure, and in the second, place both words in the text of the author, though the pointed word ought to be omitted. Sometimes also it happened that words or initials written in vermilion, having grown pale, were renewed by a later hand, which alterations have occasioned an unfounded suspicion of falsification.”

The pens of the monastic scribes were chiefly occupied in transcribing religious books, the Holy Scriptures, the works of the Fathers, the lives of saints, books of meditations and prayers; yet the classic authors were not neglected. “The Monastery of Pomposia has been much improved since the time of its founder Guido [about 1025], renowned for sanctity. Incited by the fame of his piety great numbers assumed the sacred habit in his church; marquesses, counts, and sons of noblemen have laid aside the pomps and pleasures of the world to follow there the duties of religion. Among these my master Jerome, afterwards abbot, was trained up from his earliest years to follow the monastic life, and made great proficiency in grammar and logic. He, for the edification of the brotherhood, set himself to collect the works of learned men; in order that amidst the variety, all might meet with the information they sought for. Bonus—good—both in name and life, who was first a hermit and afterwards a monk, was his librarian, a man esteemed by all as a perfect scholar, and so eager in the acquisition of books that he purchased all he met with, however indistinctly they were written; for the abbot determined to have them all transcribed for his library: and by his care almost all are now copied. He is ever inquisitive for religious books of all kinds, so that the church of Pomposia is become the most renowned in Italy. Thus by the goodness of God our thirst of knowledge is increased by knowing. Indeed the abbot’s desire of enriching his church with these treasures is unbounded. But envious persons may ask, Why does this reverend abbot place the heathen authors, the histories of tyrants, and such books, among theological works? To this we answer in the words of the apostle, that there are vessels of clay as well as of gold. By these means the tastes of all men are excited to study—the intention of the gentile writings is the same as that of the Scriptures, to give us a contempt for the world and secular greatness.”[3]

By these or similar apologies those of the monks, and there were some such in most houses, who possessed taste and learning, excused, to the more devout, the attention they bestowed upon the works of the profane authors. That the Greek and Latin classics were known and studied during what are called the dark ages, is capable of abundant proof, as we shall presently see. And those whose taste led them to be conversant with these writings took care, by the labours of their hands, to perpetuate the works they most admired.

During the flourishing period of the Grecian republics, that is, from the defeat of Xerxes to the time of Alexander the Great, many of the Greek colonies almost equalled, or even surpassed, the mother country in wealth, refinement, and intelligence. In the neighbouring islands of the Ægean Sea—in Asia Minor—in Italy and in Sicily, literature and philosophy were as eagerly cultivated as at Athens. Many of the most distinguished writers and philosophers were natives of the colonies; and if Greece itself was the principal seat of learning, and the fountain head of books, whatever was there produced quickly found its way to distant settlements; for to every city along the shores of the Mediterranean, and of the Euxine, there was a constant exportation of books: in many of these remote cities libraries were collected, and the business of copying was extensively carried on.

After the time of Alexander, Grecian literature flourished nowhere so conspicuously as at Alexandria in Egypt, under the auspices of the Ptolemies. Here all the sects of philosophy had established themselves; numerous schools were opened; and, for the advancement of learning, a library was collected, which was supposed, at one time, to have contained 700,000 volumes, in all languages. Connected with the library there were extensive offices, in which the business of transcribing books was carried on very largely, and with every possible advantage which royal munificence on the one hand, and learned assiduity on the other, could insure. Nor did the literary fame of Alexandria decline under the Roman emperors. Domitian, as Suetonius reports, sent scribes to Alexandria to copy books for the restoration of those libraries that had been destroyed by fire. And it seems to have been for some centuries afterwards a common practice for those who wished to form a library, to maintain copyists at Alexandria. The conquest of Egypt by the Saracens, A.D. 640, who burned the Alexandrian Library, banished learning for a time from that, as from other countries, which they occupied.

Attalus, and his successors, the kings of Pergamus, were great encouragers of learning; and the copying of books was carried on to so great an extent in their capital as to occasion the establishment of a vast manufacture of prepared skins (as mentioned above) which long continued to be a considerable article of commerce. The library of the kings of Pergamus is said to have contained 200,000 books.

During upwards of a thousand years, from the reign of Constantine until the fall of Constantinople, in the fifteenth century, that city was the principal seat of learning, and the chief source of books. The Byzantine historians are frequent in their praises of the munificence of the emperors in purchasing books, and in providing for their reproduction. The manuscripts executed at Constantinople are often remarkable for the great beauty of the writing, and the splendour of the decorations. Besides the imperial libraries, the churches and monasteries of the city were enriched with collections, more or less extensive, and in all of them the business of transcription was constantly and actively pursued.

A large number of existing manuscripts are dated from the monasteries of the country immediately surrounding the metropolis of the eastern empire; and many also, from those of Asia Minor, from the islands of the Ægean Sea, and especially from Cyprus.

But no spot was more famed for the production of books than Mount Athos—the lofty promontory which stretches from the Macedonian coast far into the Ægean Sea. The heights and the sides of this mountain were almost covered with religious houses, rendered by art and nature, and by the universal opinion of the sanctity of the monks of the “holy mountain,” so secure that neither the meditations nor employments of the recluses were disturbed by the approach of violence. The chief occupation of the inmates of these establishments is affirmed to have been the transcription of books, of which each monastery boasted a large collection.

Many extant manuscripts prove that the copying of books was practised extensively during the middle ages in the monasteries of the Morea, in those of the islands of Eubœa and of Crete. This latter island seems indeed to have been a place of refuge for men of learning during the latter periods of the eastern empire, who found in its monasteries, both shelter, and the means of subsistence.

Fifty religious establishments in Calabria, and the kingdom of Naples, are mentioned, from which proceeded a large number of books afterwards collected in the libraries of Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan.

In the monasteries of western Europe also, and especially in those of the British Islands, this system of copying was carried on. Though there were considerable diversities in the rules and practices of the monks of different orders, the elements of the monastic life were in all orders and in every country the same; and generally speaking, wherever there were monasteries, there was a manufacture of books. Yet, in some houses, these labours of the pen were much more worthily directed than in others. For while the monks of one monastery employed themselves in transcribing missals, legends, or romances, others enriched their libraries with splendid copies of the fathers of the church, and of the Holy Scriptures; and some, though a smaller number, took care to reproduce such of the classic authors as they might be acquainted with.

The monastic institution seemed as if it were framed for the special purpose of transmitting the remains of ancient literature—sacred and profane, through a period in which, except for so extraordinary a provision, they must inevitably have perished. In every country a large class of the community—freed from the necessity of labour, and excluded from active employments, was constrained to seek the means of allaying the pains of listlessness; and nothing could answer this purpose so well as the transcription of books. And to this employment, congruous as it was with the physical habits that are induced by an inert mode of life, and compatible, too, with the observance of a round of unvarying formalities, was attached an opinion of meritoriousness, which served to animate the diligence of the labourer. “This book, copied by M. N. for the benefit of his soul, was finished in the year ——, may the Lord think upon him.” Such are the subscriptions of many of the manuscripts of the middle ages.

Meanwhile along the cloister’s painted side,
The monks—each bending low upon his book
With head on hand reclined—their studies plied;
Forbid to parley, or in front to look,
Lengthways their regulated seats they took:
The strutting prior gazed with pompous mien,
And wakeful tongue, prepared with prompt rebuke,
If monk asleep in sheltering hood was seen;
He wary often peeped beneath that russet screen.
Hard by, against the window’s adverse light,
Where desks were wont in length of row to stand,
The gowned artificers inclined to write;
The pen of silver glistened in the hand;
Some on their fingers rhyming Latin scanned;
Some textile gold from balls unwinding drew,
And on strained velvet stately portraits planned;
Here arms, there faces shone in embryo view,
At last to glittering life the total figures grew.

Fosbrooke.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] De Re Diplomatica, Libri vi. in quibus quidquid ad veterum instrumentorum antiquitatem, materiam, scripturam et stilum; quidquid ad sigilla, monogrammata, subscriptiones ac notas chronologicas; quidquid inde ad antiquariam, historicam, forensemque disciplinam pertinet, explicatur et illustratur. Op. et Stud. Joh. Mabillon.—Fol. Paris, 1709.

[3] Italian Diary.

CHAPTER VIII.
INDICATIONS OF THE SURVIVANCE OF ANCIENT LITERATURE, THROUGH A PERIOD EXTENDING FROM THE DECLINE OF LEARNING IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY, TO ITS RESTORATION IN THE FIFTEENTH.

General epithets usually carry with them a meaning that oversteps the bounds of truth: we hear of “the dark ages”—“the period of intellectual night”—“the season of winter in the history of man”—and we are apt to imagine that during the times thus designated the human mind had become utterly palsied, and that all learning was extinct. But in fact throughout that period, reason, though often misdirected, was not sleeping: philosophy was rather bewildered than inert; and learning, although immured, was not lost.

In no part of the period that extends from the reign of Justinian, when Greek and Roman literature everywhere lay open to the light of day, till the fall of the Constantinopolitan empire, and the revival of western learning in the fifteenth century, do we lose the traces even of the classic authors, much less of those that belong to sacred literature; for in each of the intervening ages, and in every quarter of Europe, there were writers whose works, being still extant, give evidence of their acquaintance with most of the principal authors of more remote times.

Under the vague impression that has been created by certain loose modes of speaking, relative to the deep and universal ignorance said to have prevailed throughout Europe during a space of seven hundred years, the existence of a large number of manuscripts of the classic authors, undoubtedly executed during those very ages of ignorance, presents a great apparent difficulty: for, from what motive, it may be asked, or for whose use, were these works transcribed, so frequently as that they were found in all parts of Europe, on the revival of earning in the fifteenth century? The facts that are now to be mentioned, will furnish a sufficient solution of this question, by proving that, in the West and in the East, during those times of general intellectual lethargy, there were more than a few individuals who cultivated polite literature with ardour, and to whom the possession and preservation of books was a matter of the liveliest interest. The names about to be mentioned—as the well-informed reader will recollect—bear but a small proportion to the whole number that might be adduced: it is sufficient for our purpose to refer to one or two writers in each century.

But before naming individual men, whose extant writings give evidence of the continuity of literature, and therefore assure us of the safe transmission of ancient books to modern times, it will be serviceable to bring clearly into view what it is which is needed for constituting the Living Medium of this transmission. Now, for bringing this matter home to the convictions and the consciousness of the reader, let him take up his own family history, and pursue it, retrogressively, inquiring how many individuals are needed—or let us rather say how few—to make up a chain of historical and literary conveyance, through any given track of time past; for instance, from this present time, 1858, into the mid-time of the Elizabethan era, as thus:—

I will now assume the fact—whether it be true or not does not signify to the argument—that my progenitors in a direct line were educated persons—or if not so—that each father in the line secured for his son an ordinary grammar-school education—instruction just sufficient for making him cognisant of the most noted persons and authors of preceding times; so that, in each case, if the father himself did not teach the son, the father’s friend and townsman, the schoolmaster, did it, as for instance:—From my father’s own lips I received the rudiments of general history, and of literary history, so that in my boyhood I came to be familiar with all the principal names of public men and authors, up from that time to times indefinitely remote. This process of paternal instruction carries me up to the last decade of the eighteenth century: say, to the time of the breaking out of the French Revolution. But then, my father had received, either from his father, or from his father’s proxy, the schoolmaster, a like kind and amount of general information, by means of which we are carried up, without a break, to the times of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds; and in fact my father distinctly remembers, when a boy, seeing, and being in company with, some of these illustrious men, the friends of my grandfather. Then he had received—we will suppose—a similar initiation in literary and political history, and if so, then we are furnished with stepping-stones up to the times of Bentley, Pope, Swift, Addison, Watts, and although this last name would seem to stand beyond the limit of any immediate recollections, yet it is a fact that the “Divine Songs” have come to me by means of a single intervening person—from one who, as a favoured little girl, learned them, standing at the amiable doctor’s knee. Thus it is that we travel safely, and with a distinct cognisance of the way, through more than a century of literary conveyance. At this rate, and if we may take this last preceding period of time as our gauge of centuries past, then we shall require the aid of only eight or nine persons, in series, to bring us into correspondence with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Fewer than this—we might take six long-lived men to put us into this position of proximity with the worthies of the Elizabethan era.

In making good our supposition, it is not necessary to assume the fact (which we can seldom certainly know) that there has been, in any one family, a continuous succession of fathers and sons—the father living long enough to instruct the son. We should rather take the case of the intellectual filiation of college life: we imagine the learned professor, during the last ten years of his official life, imparting his mental substance to a hundred or two of scholars, some two or three of whom, at least, will live to do the like, from the same chair, in behalf of their successors. On this ground the individual teachers need not be more than twelve, upon whose oral testimony, in succession, we rely in passing from an age of generally diffused intelligence, to the times of the revival of learning, and of printed books.

It will be remembered that—if indeed there were grounds of doubt concerning the safe transmission of ancient books to modern times, any such suspicions can attach only to the period that is usually designated as the “Dark Ages,” and these need not be reckoned as more than seven, reaching back from the times of Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Wickliffe, to the pontificate of Gregory the Great, in whose times, as appears from his writings, the learning of the preceding ages was still familiarly known to more than a few.

The Sixth Century of the Christian era abounds with the names of writers in all departments of literature, many of whose works, having descended to modern times, present ample evidence of the scarcely diminished diffusion of general learning. Among many others, such were—Procopius, the historian of the reign of Justinian—and Agathias, who continued that history, and was a learned man;—Boethius, author of what is regarded as the last specimen of pure Latinity—a poem on “the Consolations of Philosophy;”—Hesychius, the lexicographer—Proclus, a platonic philosopher;—Fulgentius, and Cassiodorus, ecclesiastical writers;—Priscianus, a grammarian;—Gildas the wise, an Anglo-Saxon historian;—Evagrius Scholasticus, an ecclesiastical historian;—Simplicius, the commentator upon Aristotle and Epictetus;—Marcellinus Ammianus, an historian and critic, whose works contain copious references to ancient literature; and Stephen, of Byzantium, a grammarian and geographer. We might take in hand the work of this last-named writer—ΠΕΡΙ ΠΟΛΕΩΝ, as furnishing, by itself, a sufficient mass of evidence in proof of the extensive book-learning of those times which immediately overlook the gulf—the dark ages. This Stephen, the geographer, in the course of his account of the cities and towns of the ancient world, cites, or makes some reference to, the works of more than three hundred authors, to which he had access at any moment, while compiling his own.

The Seventh Century produced fewer writers than perhaps any other period that can be named within the compass of literary history. Yet there are more than enough to serve our present purpose: such are—Theophylact of Simocatta, who has left a history of the reign of the emperor Maurice, not very highly esteemed indeed, but abounding in allusions to the literature of the times.

Isidore, bishop of Seville, a complete collection of whose works fills seven quarto volumes, is a writer very proper to be mentioned in relation to our present purpose. Confessedly the age of Mahomet was a dull time: few indeed are the writers whose mere names have come down to us;—and yet, even in such a time, a voluminous writer, who treats of all kinds of subjects—religion, Church history, grammar, poetry, astronomy, physical science, and treats some of these systematically, might not only employ himself in labours of this kind, but also find among his contemporaries, and the men of the next age, numerous readers, and admirers, and copyists too, who found their account in transcribing so vast a product of literary industry. The times of this bishop, therefore, dark as they might be, were nevertheless times of book-knowledge: throughout the dim period there was a class of the learned, numerous and intelligent enough, to keep watch upon the intellectual treasures of brighter times, to conserve the rich inheritance of mind, and to do their office in transmitting it down, unimpaired, to after ages. This fact is all which just now we need think of.

What we have thus said of the seventh century—of its darkness and its light, might be affirmed with little difference, as to the next. Our countryman, the “Venerable Bede,” flourished in the seventh, but lived far on into the eighth century. The writings of Bede—and we should remember that he passed his life in the seclusion of a remote monastery—St. Peter and St. Paul, on the Tyne, in the diocese of Durham—afford ample proof of a wide diffusion of books, in that age. Bede displays extensive, if not profound learning, the whole of which he had acquired from sources that were ordinarily within the reach of monastic students. Bede “was a man of universal learning, not less skilled in the Greek than in the Latin tongue: a poet, a rhetorician, an historian, an astronomer, an arithmetician, a master of chronology and geography, a philosopher, and theologian. So much was he admired in his own times that it became a proverbial saying among the learned—“A man born in the farthest corner of the earth has compassed the earth with the line of his genius.” “He was,” says Bale, “versed in the profane authors beyond any man of that age. Physics and general learning he derived, not from turbid streams, but from the pure fountains; that is, from the chief Greek and Latin authors. Indeed, there is hardly anything of value in the compass of ancient literature, that is not to be met with in Bede, although he never travelled beyond the limits of his native land.”

The conservative function was taken up by several of Bede’s disciples; among them we may name Alcuin, who did much, by his learning and his influence at the court of Charlemagne, to aid the endeavours of that enlightened prince for the restoration of literature. He was skilled in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages; gave lectures in all the sciences, and founded many public schools. His works, historical and theological, are in part extant, and they justify the reputation he enjoyed. In his letters he familiarly quotes the classic writers.

Charlemagne, himself tolerably well acquainted with Latin and Greek authors, zealously laboured to restore learning in the Church, and out of it. He invited learned men to his court, employed them in making Latin translations of the Greek classics and of the fathers, founded public schools, and introduced regulations tending to make some degree of education indispensable to all who held office in the Church. Of the professors invited by Charlemagne to his court, as many came from the British Isles as from Italy. We must not forget, says Muratori, the praise of Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, which, in the study of the liberal arts, surpassed all other nations of the West in those times; nor omit to record the diligence of the monks of those countries, who roused and maintained the glory of letters which everywhere else was languishing or fallen.

Raban Maurus, a disciple of Alcuin, created archbishop of Mentz, in 847, had, before his elevation, taught theology, philosophy, poetry, and rhetoric at Paris, in the school established there by the Anglo-Saxon monks. “A man well versed in the Holy Scriptures, and thoroughly learned in profane literature, as his writings abundantly testify.” He enriched the monastery of Fulda, on the Rhine, where he received his early education, with a large collection of books; and there he founded a school. Two hundred and seventy monks belonged to the establishment, who were trained by him in every branch of learning. Disciples flocked to him from all countries, and he reared for the Church a great number of ministers well furnished for its service. He died, 856.

One of the first professors in the University of Oxford founded (or restored) by King Alfred, was John Scot; he afterwards went into France, where he was honourably entertained at the court of Charles the Bald, at whose request he translated some Greek authors into Latin: but these versions, in which a literal adherence to the original was observed, were scarcely intelligible to those for whose use they were intended. His writings display, however, much various learning; they were condemned as heretical by the Church on account of his opinions relative to the Eucharist. Being driven from France by the order of the pope, he took refuge in an English monastery; but there, at the instigation of the monks, he, it is said, like Cassianus, was killed by his scholars, with their iron styles.

Before the Danish incursions, the English monasteries and churches abounded with men of learning; but these establishments being broken up and the monks dispersed by the rude invaders, literature and the arts became almost extinct in the country. Alfred, himself a man of learning, and a various writer, effected, as is known, much towards their restoration, by the re-establishment of the ruined monasteries—the erection of many new ones—the endowment of schools—the foundation of lectureships at Oxford, and by the diffusion of his own writings, which, even if he had not been a king, would have perpetuated his name.

Contemporary with the last-named writer was Photius, with whom no author of that, or of several succeeding ages, can be compared: his works hold up a mirror of the literature that was extant in his times. Photius, educated for secular employments, and for some time engaged in the service of Michael III., was by that emperor forcibly invested with the dignity of patriarch of Constantinople (858) in the room of Ignatius. That he might pass regularly to this elevation, he was made monk, reader, sub-deacon, deacon, priest, and patriarch, in the course of six days. From the office thus violently assumed, he was, with little ceremony, expelled by Basilius, the successor of Michael. Once again, at the head of a band of soldiers, he possessed himself of the patriarchate, of which, by similar means, he was at length finally deprived; after which he retired to a monastery, where he ended his days. Before his elevation, he had composed the most useful and the most celebrated of his works, the Myriobiblon, which contains, in the form of criticisms, analyses, and extracts, an account of upwards of 270 works. This treasury of learning preserves many valuable fragments from authors whose works have perished, and affords important aid in ascertaining the genuineness of many of the remains of ancient literature.

Eutychius, an Egyptian physician, and afterwards (933) patriarch of Alexandria, wrote a universal history, which is still extant, and which, though it contains numerous fables, exhibits the various learning of the author, and of his times. Though so large a number of existing manuscripts as appear to have been executed in the tenth century, prove that a great degree of activity in the reproduction of books prevailed in that age, it presents the names of few authors whose works have descended to modern times.

The Eleventh Century is much richer in distinguished names, of which it may suffice to mention these:—

Avicenna, an Arabian physician and Mahometan doctor, reduced the science of medicine to a systematic form, including almost everything that had been written on the subject by his predecessors: he was versed in Greek literature, and is said to have committed Aristotle’s Metaphysics to memory. The first conquests of the Saracens in Asia, Africa, and Spain, during the seventh and eighth centuries, were almost fatal to the interests of learning. But no sooner had they well established their power in the conquered countries, than the Caliphs sought to rekindle the light of knowledge. During two or three centuries, Bagdat in the East, and Cordova in the West, were the seats, not only of splendid monarchies, but of science, general learning, and great refinement. It was, however, chiefly the mathematical and physical sciences that were cultivated by the Arabians. They possessed imperfect and corrupted translations of several of the Greek authors, especially of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Euclid, and Dioscorides; and they had some general, though imperfect, acquaintance with the Greek historians. Some of the Latin translations, made by the order of Charlemagne, were derived from these Arabian versions.

Michael Psellus, a Greek physician, and a monk, wrote upon subjects of all kinds: “There was no science which he did not either illustrate by his comments, or abridge, or reduce to a better method.—A man celebrated for the extent of his acquirements in divine and human learning, as his many works, both printed and in manuscript, evince.”

Lanfranc, by birth an Italian, was created archbishop of Canterbury by William of Normandy; he promoted learning among the clergy, and was himself reputed to be universally accomplished in the literature extant in that age.

Anselm, the disciple and successor of Lanfranc, in the see of Canterbury, was also in repute for general learning.

The works of Suidas, a Byzantine monk, like those of Photius, contain a vast store of various learning, singularly useful on points of criticism and literary history. The lexicon of this writer, besides the definition of words, contains accounts of ancient authors of all classes, and many quotations from works that have since perished.

Sigebert, a monk of Brabant, has left a chronicle of events from A. D. 381 to his own times, 1112, and a work containing the lives of illustrious men.

The name of Anna Comnena, daughter of the emperor Alexius Comnenus, and wife of Nicephorus Bryennius, distinguishes the early part of the twelfth century. She wrote an elegant and eloquent history of her father’s reign. This work displays not only a masculine understanding, but an extensive acquaintance with literature and the sciences.

England produced during this century several eminent writers, who were accomplished in the learning of the age. Such were William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntington, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Joseph of Exeter—author of two Latin poems, on the Trojan war, and the war of Antioch, or the Crusade—and, somewhat later, Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, reckoned the most learned man of western Europe in those times.

Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, flourished towards the close of the twelfth century. His commentaries on Homer, besides serving to elucidate the Greek language by many important criticisms, drawn from sources that have since been lost, contain, like the works of Photius and Suidas, innumerable references to the Greek classics, and thus furnish the means of ascertaining the integrity and the genuineness of the text of those authors, as they are now extant.

The brothers John and Isaac Tzetzes, critics and grammarians of Constantinople, are still consulted as commentators upon some of the Greek authors. John Tzetzes is a voluminous writer: his extant works give evidence at once of his vast acquaintance with literature, and of the literary facilities of that age, at least in cities such as Constantinople.

Robert Grostest (Greathead), bishop of Lincoln, was famed for his skill in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages, as well as for the bold resistance he made to the exactions of the popes upon the English church. Camden says of him that “he was a man versed in the languages and in general literature in a degree scarcely credible, when the age in which he lived is considered; a terrible reprover of the pope, the adviser of his king (Henry III.), and a lover of truth.”

Matthew Paris, one of the earliest of the English historians, displays in his works an acquaintance with ancient literature, as well as a familiar knowledge of the antiquities of his native country. Like the bishop last named, Paris vigorously opposed the papal usurpations in England; nor did he less courageously reprove vice in every rank at home. His reputation as a man of learning and virtue enabled him to effect a considerable reformation in many of the English monasteries. He died 1259. The “Historia Major” of this writer begins with the Norman Conquest, and is continued to the year of the author’s death, 1259.

The works of Albert, called the Great, a Dominican friar, and afterwards, in 1260, bishop of Ratisbon, fill one-and-twenty volumes. They are chiefly on the physical sciences, but include a sort of encyclopædia of the learning of the age. “A man of wonderful erudition, to whom few things in theological science, and hardly any in secular learning, were unknown. On account of the extent and variety of his acquirements surnamed ‘the Great’—an honour conferred upon no other learned man during life.” Albert, like Roger Bacon, incurred among his contemporaries the suspicion of being a magician. Learning, in the restricted sense of the term, or the knowledge of books, though possessed by a comparatively small class of persons, was too frequent to excite wonder or envy; but Science, or a knowledge of nature, and this acquired, not from Aristotle, but from experiment, was so rare, that it seldom failed to engender both, and to occasion a dangerous accusation of correspondence with infernal spirits.

The revival of learning is usually reckoned to have commenced in the fifteenth century: but in the fourteenth a very decided advancement in almost every department of literature had taken place. That the ignorance which had prevailed in the preceding century was wearing away from the bulk of the community in several parts of Europe, and that the educated classes were acquiring a better taste and more expanded views, needs no other evidence than that which is so abundantly presented in the works of Dante, of Petrarch, of Boccatio, of Chaucer, and of Gower, which were not merely produced in that period, but were extensively read and admired.

Fewer instances than those given above might suffice to prove, that at no part of that tract of time, which extends from the decline of learning in the sixth century, to its revival in the fifteenth, was there anything which can be called an extinction of the knowledge of ancient literature. This proof, it must be acknowledged, is much more complete in reference to the Greek, than to the Latin authors; it is also more ample in relation to ecclesiastical and sacred, than to profane literature. Of all the extant manuscripts, executed in the middle ages, perhaps nineteen in twenty belong to the former class. The continuance of the eastern empire till the middle of the fifteenth century, afforded an uninterrupted protection to Greek learning during those periods in which western Europe was laid waste by the Gothic nations. Yet even those devastations were never universal either in their extent, or in their kind. At times when Italy was in ashes, the British Islands were secure. And if cities were sacked and burned, and if castles, palaces, and cathedrals were pillaged and overthrown, hundreds of religious houses, in strong or secluded situations, remained untouched; or if occasionally they were subjected to the violence of armies, or to the exactions of conquerors, they more often lost their chests, their cups and their salvers, than their books.

Learning and the sciences can flourish and advance only where there are the means of a wide and quick diffusion of the fruits of intellectual labour: but they may exist even under the almost total absence of such means. This was the case in Europe during the middle ages. Knowledge rested with the few whom the inward fire of native genius constrained to pursue it: and these few were often insulated from each other, and unknown beyond the walls within which they spent their lives; and often secluded also by their tastes, even from their fellows of the same society.

In every myriad of the human race, take the number where or when we may, there will be found a few individuals—born for thought; and if the vocation of nature is not always stronger than every obstacle, it is, for the most part, strong enough to overcome such as are of ordinary magnitude. Those who are thus endowed with the appetite for knowledge, will certainly follow the impulse, if the means of its acquirement are presented to them in early life. Now these means were everywhere interspersed among the nations of Europe during the middle ages, by the monastic system; and it may be questioned whether there were not then greater chances for drawing within the pale of learning the native mind of every district, than are afforded even by the present constitutions of society. The religious houses were so thickly scattered through every country, and the continual draught from the population for the maintenance of the numbers of their inmates (a standing rule of the monastic establishments enjoined that the original number of each congregation should be maintained) was so great, that they must have taken up many more than the gifted individuals of every neighbourhood; and yet such individuals would almost certainly be included within that enlistment; for whenever a youth displayed a fondness for learning, nothing better could be done for him, whether he was the son of a peasant or a noble, than to devote him to the service of the Church. The monasteries usually contained schools for the youth of their vicinities. From these schools the superiors of the house had the opportunity of selecting any who gave promise of intelligence.

In the very darkest times, learning insured to its possessor a degree of reputation; and the heads of religious houses, in most instances, sought to decorate their establishments with some particles of the honours of erudition, as well as to recommend them by the possession of relics; and many were eagerly ambitious to enhance the literary celebrity of their communities. With this view it would be their policy to afford the necessary means and encouragement to those who seemed most likely to support the credit of the society. “The education of a monk, at least in the fourteenth century, consisted of church music and the primary sciences, grammar, logic, and philosophy—obviously that of Aristotle. Some French and Latin must also have been included; for these were the languages the monks were enjoined to speak on public occasions. They were afterwards sent to Oxford or Paris to learn theology. Such indeed was the encouragement held out to literature, that in a provincial chapter of abbots and priors of the Benedictine order, held at Northampton A.D. 1343, men of letters and masters of art were invited to become monks, by a promise of exemption from all daily services.”—Fosbrooke.

Independently therefore of any more direct evidence, there would be reason to believe that many if not most of the monasteries and conventual churches, at all times, included an individual or two whose tastes led him to devote his life to study, and who would become the sedulous guardian and conservator of the books of the house, directing the labours of his less intelligent brethren in the work of transcribing such as might be falling into decay.

In the estimation of minds ruled by the love of books, even if incapable of discriminating the precious from the worthless—the worthless, by a principle of association, partakes, to a large degree, of the respect that belongs in reason only to what is intrinsically valuable. A BOOK, whatever be its subject or its merits, is viewed with a fond covetousness by those whose passion it is to love books. This feeling must have been strong indeed in times when books were hardly to be purchased, and when their ideal value included a recollection of the toil of transcription. The spirit of the ruling superstition, which taught the attachment of an incalculable importance to objects intrinsically worthless, must also have favoured an undistinguishing reverence for books. We need not then be surprised to find that works of all classes, though altogether unsuited to the taste of the times, were reproduced, from age to age, by the monkish copyists.

While, therefore, all taste for instruction had disappeared from the face of society—while kings and nobles were often as ignorant as artisans and peasants, while even many of the clergy retained only some shreds of learning, the productions of brighter ages were still hoarded and perpetuated, and were made accessible to the few whose intellectual ardour carried them beyond the standard of their times.

The reader who would extend his acquaintance with the subjects so briefly referred to in this chapter will find the means of doing so amply supplied in the work of Mr. Maitland which so conclusively establishes the fact of the uninterrupted continuance of the intellectual life of Europe through those ages which too hastily have been spoken of by modern writers as times of universal ignorance.[4]

FOOTNOTES:

[4] The Dark Ages; a series of Essays, intended to illustrate the state of Religion and Literature in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Centuries. By the Rev. S. R. Maitland, &c.

CHAPTER IX.
THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

More than half a century before the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the learned men of that city, apprehensive of the approaching fall of the empire, had begun to emigrate into Italy, where they opened schools, and became the preceptors of princes and the guides of the public taste, which they directed towards the study of the classic writers of Greece especially, and even of Rome. But it was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 which filled the Italian cities with these learned strangers.

The Italians of that age needed only to receive this kind of direction, and to be aided by these means of study; for they had for some time been placed under those peculiar circumstances which have ever proved the most favourable to the advancement of the human mind. Throughout a number of independent states—crowded upon a narrow space, the same language, yet diversified by dialects, was spoken. The energy, the rivalry, the munificence that accompany an active commerce kept the whole mass of society in movement; while the influence of a gorgeous superstition, which sought to recommend itself by every embellishment that the genius of man could devise or execute, overruled the tendency of successful trade, and directed the ambition of princely merchants towards objects more noble and intellectual than are those which wealth usually selects as the means of distinction.

The formation of libraries, suggested or favoured by the abundant importation of manuscripts from Constantinople, was the means not only of making more widely known the works of those Greek authors which had never fallen into oblivion, but of prompting researches which issued in the recovery of the Latin writers also, many of whom had long been forgotten. The appetite for books having thus been quickened, neither cost nor labour was thenceforward spared in their accumulation; and learned men were despatched, in all directions, throughout Europe, western Asia, and Africa, expressly to collect manuscripts. In the course of a few years, most of the authors that are now known to us, were brought together in the libraries of Rome, Naples, Venice, Florence, Milan, Vienna, and Paris, where they were laid open to those who were best qualified to give them forth anew to the world.

Thus aided by the munificence and zeal of princes and popes, the scholars of the fifteenth century sedulously applied themselves to the discovery, the restoration, and the publication of the remains of Greek and Roman literature; and so it was that in the course of sixty or eighty years, most of the works now known had been committed to the press. Since that time some few discoveries have been made; but the principal improvements in classic literature, of later date, have consisted in the emendation of the text of ancient authors by means of a more extensive collation of manuscripts than the first editors had any opportunity to institute. This restoration of the remains of ancient works to their pristine integrity has not been effected, like that of a dilapidated building, or a mutilated statue, by the addition of new materials in an imagined conformity with the plan and taste of the original work; but by the industrious collection and replacement of the very particles of which it at first consisted.

The invention of printing, which virtually exempts books from the operation of the law that subjects all things mundane to the decays of time, has greatly promoted also the process of their renovation; for, by giving to the issue of an edition of a standard work a degree of importance, several hundred times greater than what belonged to the transcription of a single copy, it has called for the employment of a proportionably larger amount of learning, diligence, and caution in the work of revision; and then, by enabling each successive editor to avail himself of the labours of his predecessors, the advantages belonging to the concentration of many minds upon the same subject have been secured.

It is a fact therefore, the significance of which should be clearly understood, that, since the fifteenth century, the lapse of time, instead of gradually impairing and corrupting the literary remains of antiquity, has incessantly contributed to their renovation and purification. Indeed it may be affirmed that, in relation to the amount, the exactitude, and the certainty of our knowledge, we are not receding from remote ages, but are constantly approaching towards them. In a thousand instances what was unknown, or was doubtful, or imperfect, or corrupted, at the commencement of the fifteenth century, has been ascertained, restored, and completed in the nineteenth. The history and the literature of Greece and Rome—long inhumed in monasteries, were, at the period of their re-appearance, liable to uncertainties and to suspicions which not all the learning and industry of that vigorous age were able to dispel. But the learning and the industry of the four centuries that have since elapsed, constantly directed towards the same objects, and constantly accumulating a various mass of evidence, have left exceedingly few questions of literary antiquity open to controversy.

Thus then, by the mention of some leading facts, we have traced the remains of ancient literature up to the time when they passed to the press, and when their history can no longer be regarded as obscure or questionable. Nor can it be thought that this body of literature is now liable to the hazards of extinction from political changes, or from the decline of learning in this or that country; for unless a universal devastation should take its course, at once, over every region of the civilized world, the literature now extant in books can neither perish, nor suffer corruption. A temple, a statue, a picture, or a gem is but one; and however durable may be the material of which it consists, it continually decays, and it is always destructible. The touch of the sculptor moulders from the chiselled surface; and the time will come when every monument of his genius shall have crumbled into dust, and when his fame—lost from the marble, shall live only in the works of the poets and historians who were his contemporaries.

Thus it is that the written records of distant ages, with the knowledge of which the intellectual, moral, and political well-being of mankind is inseparably connected, are secured from extinction by a mode of conservation that is less liable to extensive hazards than any other that can be imagined. If Man be cut off from the knowledge of the past, he becomes indifferent to the future, and thenceforward sinks into the rudeness and ferocity of the sensual life. The redundant amplitude, therefore, of the means by which this knowledge is preserved, only bears a due proportion to the importance of the consequences that depend upon its perpetuation.

CHAPTER X.
SEVERAL METHODS AVAILABLE FOR ASCERTAINING THE CREDIBILITY OF ANCIENT HISTORICAL WORKS.

The facts referred to in the preceding chapters belong in common to ancient books of all classes, and they tend to prove that the works of the Greek and Roman writers—poets, dramatists, philosophers, critics, and historians—which issued from the press in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, may, by means of various and independent evidence, be infallibly traced up to the age in which they are commonly supposed to have been written.

The reader’s attention is now to be directed to one class of those ancient works, namely, those which are professedly historical; and our object will be to ascertain on what grounds, and with what limitations, such works deserve our confidence as truthful narratives of facts.

The very same mode of inquiry which common sense suggests, on the most ordinary occasions, when we are called upon to estimate the value of testimony, is applicable to all cases of the like nature. Nor can the importance of the consequences that may be involved in the issue of the investigation, in a peculiar instance, render it invalid, or warrant our rejection of it as unsatisfactory.

In some lesser particulars the modes of estimating oral and written testimony must differ; but in substance the heads of inquiry will be the same. In the case with which we have now to do—namely, the credibility of the testimony of ancient historians, it is natural to consider the following points:—

1. The moral and intellectual character of the writer,—if this can be known;

2. The means of information he possessed;

3. The time and circumstances of the first publication of the work;

4. The exceptions it may be necessary to make to his testimony on particular points; arising either from the peculiar nature of the facts affirmed, or from the apparent influence of prejudice—personal, or national; and—

5. The agreement of the narrative in question with evidence derived from other, and independent sources.

In judging then of the authenticity of an historical work we have, in the first place, to form an estimate of the writer’s moral and intellectual character and qualifications; supposing that the means of forming an opinion on these points are within our reach.

If the personal integrity of an historian has happened to be put to the proof by any well known and remarkable events, in which he was concerned, the reader whose own character may qualify him to feel the force of such proof, will seldom ask for better grounds of confidence; for such errors in matters of fact as a thoroughly honest historian may be liable to, will seldom be of vital importance. Even if no such proof of a writer’s personal integrity exists, and if the circumstances of his life are altogether unknown, yet almost every writer leaves in his works sufficient indications of his moral dispositions. The characteristics of honesty are distinct enough to secure the confidence of candid minds; nor can an instance be adduced in which they have been so successfully counterfeited as to have stood the test of time. A perverse intention as certainly betrays itself in writing, as it does in personal behaviour. Nevertheless this sort of evidence, though it will be more satisfactory than any other to one reader, may be unperceived by another; for cold, feeble, and suspicious minds are destitute of the sympathies to which it appeals.

If the proofs of integrity and veracity in an historian are wanting, or are thought to be insufficient, we must descend to that sort of evidence which his works afford relative to his intellectual qualifications; and these may be such as fully to warrant a general confidence in his preference of truth to falsehood. As to the strongest minds, such minds attach themselves to truth by an instinctive movement: to acquire the knowledge of facts is their characteristic passion;—to promulgate this knowledge is the function they feel themselves born to fulfill. Nor can it happen that the falsification of facts—in which neither personal interests nor prejudices are involved—should present an adequate inducement to writers whose powers of narration enable them to command more attention in the direct paths of truth and reality, than they could hope to gain in the regions of fiction. Every gifted mind has its sphere; and there is a native talent for history, as well as a genius for poetry; and he who possesses eminently the former, will as certainly make himself conversant with realities, as he who may boast the possession of the latter will choose to live among the creations of fancy.

If therefore an historical work displays a healthy vigour of intellect—good sense—elevation of sentiment, and the specific talent for narration, these qualities may safely be held to afford a strong presumptive proof of the author’s veracity, even though there should be no direct means of ascertaining his moral dispositions, or his integrity. Those writers who occupy a first rank among ancient historians may therefore safely be held to possess this presumptive proof of their veracity; for the reputation they have so long enjoyed is attributable, quite as much to their talent for narration, as to the interest or importance of the story that forms the subject of their works. These intrinsic merits contain, then, a tacit guarantee for the authenticity of the works that are thus adorned.

On this ground, the good sense, the simplicity, the ease, and the accuracy of Herodotus—the stern vigour, the elevation, and the dignity of Thucydides, the graceful simplicity of Xenophon, and the philosophic terseness of Tacitus, not only win the admiration of the reader, but, in different degrees, these qualities invite, or demand, his confidence.

There are moreover qualities of style which, though they may not entitle an author to a place in the first rank of writers, must secure for him a high regard as an authentic historian. Indeed, in this department of literature, those less brilliant and less attractive qualities which give security as to an historian’s diligence, accuracy, and impartiality, may well be accepted in place of the brighter recommendations of genius, or eloquence, or powers of description. There is a specific taste for details, there is a passion for laborious researches, there is a superstitious regard to exactness, and an indefatigable industry, which, though they may tire the reader who seeks only for amusement, will secure the confidence and attention of the intelligent student of history. Thus, for example, the assiduity of Diodorus the Sicilian, the accuracy and good sense of Polybius, and the minuteness and amplification of Dionysius the Halicarnassian, give to their works a substantial value which goes far to compensate for the want of more shining excellences.

In those historical works which have necessarily been compiled from various documents, a sound judgment in the selection of materials must be considered as the principal merit of an author. In this quality some of the ancient historians were certainly deficient; and yet it must be added that to this very want of judgment we are indebted for the knowledge of innumerable particulars, in themselves curious, or perhaps important, which our modern notions of method, consistency, and propriety, would greatly have retrenched, or entirely have excluded.

Although, to a certain extent, the genius or talent of an historian may be held to vouch for his veracity; yet it is also true that a writer may possess a sort of genius which tends to bring his fidelity into suspicion. If, for example, he continually indulges his taste for scenes of splendour, or terror, or extraordinary action, or if he loves to exhibit images of magnanimity or wisdom, surpassing the ordinary reach of human nature; if his principal personages are heroes, or if he seems pleased to find occasions on which to display his command of the nervous eloquence of vituperation, we may well conclude that his genius will have tempted him to relinquish the merit of being simply exact, or calmly just.

A consideration of personal and national prejudices enters, of course, into the estimate that is formed of an historian’s moral and intellectual character. But these will be best adverted to when we come to mention the exceptions which it is necessary to make against the evidence of historians, on particular points.

We have next to make inquiry concerning the means of information which may have been possessed by an ancient historian.

The same kind of confidence that is due to an historian who narrates events in which he was personally concerned, cannot be claimed by one who compiles the history of remote times from such materials as he can collect: for in the former case, if we are assured of the writer’s veracity and competency, there remains no room for reasonable doubt; at least in reference to those principal facts of the story for the truth of which his character is pledged. But in the other case, though we may think well both of the writer’s veracity and judgment, the confidence we afford him must still be conditional, and will be measured by the opinion we form of the validity of his authorities.

The entire mass of ancient history may therefore be considered as consisting of two kinds, namely, the original and the compiled. In the first class may be comprehended, not merely those narratives that are strictly personal, such for instance as the history of the retreat of the ten thousand Greeks, by Xenophon; or again the Commentaries of Cæsar, which describe actions wherein the author was immediately concerned, and was, in fact, the principal actor; but those also which relate to the events of the author’s own times and country, and concerning which he had the most direct and unquestionable means of becoming accurately informed. Such are the history of the Peloponnesian war by Thucydides; and the history of the Catiline conspiracy by Sallust, and much of the histories and annals of Tacitus, and the history of the reign of Justinian by Procopius; and that of her father’s reign by Anna Comnena.

The credibility of historical works of this class must, obviously, be determined chiefly upon the grounds mentioned in the preceding section; that is to say, from those indications of integrity, impartiality, and good sense, which the work exhibits. Every reader of Thucydides, for example, feels that he may rely with confidence upon the general authenticity of the narrative:—the caution and the unwearied assiduity of the author in ascertaining the truth of whatever he affirms, his exactness in minute circumstances, his eminent good sense and fairness, and the dignity of his manner, all concur to stamp upon the work, for the most part, the seal of truth. In original histories the truth of the story and the veracity of the writer are inseparably linked together:—both must be admitted, or both should be denied.

But by far the greater part of all extant history belongs to the second class; and yet, among works that must rank as compilations, some wide distinctions are to be observed; for there are some of this kind of which the authenticity is little, if at all, inferior to that of the best original histories; while many are, in the ordinary sense of the term, compilations, and as such deserve only a qualified confidence. In regard to the nature and probable value of the authorities they have relied upon, each historian—and indeed almost every separate portion of the works of each writer—must be estimated apart. An example or two will be sufficient to show, as well the necessity, as the mode of exercising this discrimination.

The nine books of Herodotus afford instances of every degree of validity in regard to the probable value of the materials that were employed by the author. A reader who, in his simplicity, peruses that work, throughout, with an equal faith, will be in danger of having his indiscriminate confidence suddenly converted into undistinguishing scepticism, by discovering the slenderness of the authority upon which some portions of it are made to rest.

Diodorus, the Sicilian, is reported to have employed thirty years in collecting materials for his universal history. Like Herodotus, he visited the countries of which he speaks—consulting public records—inspecting monuments—conversing with the learned, and collecting books. In fact his work exhibits many proofs of this assiduity; but yet when some of his statements are compared with those of other writers, who were better informed on particular subjects, it becomes apparent that he exercised too little caution in the selection of his authorities; and that therefore the discrimination of the reader, or of the learned annotator, must supply the want of judgment in the writer.

The universal history of Trogus Pompeius, which is extant only in the abridgement made by Justin, seems to have been compiled on a plan somewhat similar to that of the work last mentioned. It is evident that the author, in collecting his materials, employed considerable diligence and judgment; nevertheless, in what relates to remote nations, he shows himself often to have been egregiously misinformed. A striking instance of this kind is furnished in the account he gives of the history and religion of the Jews (Book xxxvi. cap. 2); for it is evident that the author—whether it be Trogus, or Justin, must have received his information—not from the source from which he ought to have derived it—the Jewish records;—nor even from individuals of that nation; but from prejudiced and ill-informed men of the neighbouring countries of Asia or of Africa. The account given by Tacitus (Hist. Book v.) of the same people, is little more just than is that of Trogus. If these instances were to be taken as specimens of the accuracy of ancient historians in all similar cases, their descriptions of remote nations must be held to be of very little value. But there seems reason to believe that the history and institutions of the Jews were much less known, and were more misrepresented, than those of any other people bordering upon the Mediterranean.

Abundant evidence proves that, from the very earliest ages, and in almost all countries, there were persons employed and authorized by governments to digest the current history of the state. These annals contained, of course, the names of kings, and the records of their acts and exploits, their decrees and wars. Each city, as well as the capitals of empires, had its archives; and these public documents appear to have suggested the idea of a more comprehensive form of history. They were certainly consulted by those who, in later times, undertook the composition of historical works: by these means there was imparted to such works more of authenticity and exactness than may be generally supposed. Herodotus, Thucydides, Diodorus, Pausanias, Strabo, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Arrian, Dion Cassius, the Elder Pliny, and others, evidently availed themselves with all possible diligence of such public records.

Ancient historians conversed extensively with official persons, wherever they travelled; and it must be granted they were often too ready to accept these oral communications as authentic. This is especially to be observed in reference to those accounts that were confessedly, or that seem to have been received from priests; for that class of persons, too much accustomed to think truth their enemy, and deception their business, would have thought themselves betraying the interests of their order in furnishing simple facts to an inquirer.

Every city of the ancient world, where civilization had made any progress, was crowded with columns, statues, busts, monuments, inscriptions, by which every memorable event, and every illustrious personage, was perpetually presented to the regards of the people, and was retained in their recollection. It is certain that this monumental and sculptural mode of embodying a people’s history obtained to a far greater extent in ancient cities than it does in those of our times. And so it was that to visit a city—to pace its public ways—to enter its temples and its halls, was to peruse its history. The meanest citizen—even a child, would be able to conduct an inquisitive stranger through the streets, and to explain to him these memorials of the past. It is difficult for us in these times, and in these inclement latitudes, to form an adequate notion of the extent to which the history of each people was familiarized to them by these means; or how much the living conversed with the dead, and identified themselves with whatever was heroic or wise in preceding times. These public monuments, when collated with the public records, and explained by the public voice, furnished historians with abundant materials; and so great was the importance attached to them, that there are instances in which historians made long journeys for the express purpose of examining the sculptures of a city, the history of which they had occasion incidentally to mention.

What was most wanting to give a higher value, in point of authenticity, to the materials so diligently collected by the ancient historians was—that general diffusion of information among neighbouring nations which would have subjected the fables and the boastful pretensions of each people to the animadversion of others, and thus have given room for a more ready and complete collation of discordant evidence on the same points. The Greeks were very little acquainted with the languages of the surrounding nations; and they were egregiously ignorant of facts in which they were not immediately concerned. If the literature of the Asiatic nations had been familiarly current in Greece, and that of Greece in Asia, both would have been purged of many errors and frivolities; and something more of that consistency, expansion, and good sense imparted on both sides, which were acquired by the Roman writers in consequence of their acquaintance with the literature of Greece. In the department of history, especially, such an interchange of light would have enhanced immensely the value, as well as augmented the amount of knowledge. Knowledge, like the vital fluid, corrupts whenever it ceases freely to circulate.

On this ground, the moderns possess, incomparably, an advantage over the ancients; and even if party interests and political prejudices act more forcibly in modern times, the means of correction are also vastly more efficient. European nations have, in relation to important subjects, a common literature:—all things are known by all: national misrepresentations are quickly noticed and chastised. The same corrective process is actively carried on within each community; and if particular falsifications abound, the ultimate probabilities of the prevalence of truth are still more abundant.

In estimating the credibility of ancient writers—historians especially, we have to consider the time and circumstances of the first publication of such works.

To ascertain the antiquity of historical works is peculiarly important, because when that point has been placed out of doubt, we obtain, in most instances, a conclusive proof of the general truth of the narrative. For if a history is known to have been published, and widely circulated, and generally admitted to be authentic, in the very age when the principal facts to which it relates were matters of universal notoriety, and when most of the lesser circumstances were perfectly known to many of the author’s contemporaries, and when some of them stood personally related to the events, we have the best reasons for confiding in the substantial truth and accuracy of the history.

No pretended narrative, published under circumstances such as these, which was altogether untrue in its main elements, or which was grossly incorrect in its details, could, by any accident, or by any endeavours, have gained general and lasting reputation as an authentic work. No such book could endure, and survive, the scrutiny of contemporary antagonists; no such book could maintain its reputation through the next age, while the means of ascertaining the truth of the narrative were still extant, and after the interests and prejudices of the moment had subsided.

As in relation to the sources of information that were possessed by historians, it has been seen that historical works should be divided into two classes—the original, and the derived; so a similar, but not exactly an identical division must be made in relation to the circumstances under which such books were at first published. In the first class are to be included those histories of the truth of which the author’s contemporaries, in general, were competent judges; and in the second, such, as having been drawn from rare, or recondite, or scattered materials—relating to events remote in time or place, could not be open to the test of public opinion, and could be estimated only by a few of the learned class.

Histories of the first kind may be termed—popular; those of the second—learned. It is evident that learned histories, although on different grounds, may deserve a high degree of confidence as to their authenticity and their accuracy; and, indeed, on the score of impartiality and comprehensive information, and exactness in details, they may greatly surpass any of the original narratives from which they may have been compiled. For it is manifest that a later historian, if he be industrious, judicious, and unprejudiced, has the opportunity so to collect and collate the various mass of subsidiary testimonies bearing upon particular facts, as shall impart much more of consistency to his narrative than can belong to any earlier work on the same subject.

But the direct proof of authenticity must belong exclusively to popular histories. A work of this class is, essentially, a condensation of the common knowledge of a nation or community; it is the universal testimony, arranged and compacted by one whose aim it is to found his personal reputation as a writer upon the consent and approval of his contemporaries. Let it be supposed that in passing through the crowded ways of a metropolis, we hear, in substance, the same account of some recent and public transaction, from a thousand lips, and from opposing parties; or we read a narrative of this event drawn up by a contemporary writer, whose veracity has been tacitly or explicitly assented to by the same parties. The validity of the evidence rests upon the same grounds in both cases; only that for accuracy and consistency, the accepted written narrative will be found to surpass the oral testimony.

We may take as an example the latter books of Herodotus, which, viewed with reference to the distinction above mentioned, may be reckoned as belonging to the class of popular histories, and may therefore deserve the confidence that is due to a narrative that has generally been accepted as true by those who were well acquainted with the facts it describes, and many of whom were personally concerned in the transactions it narrates. The history of the Peloponnesian war, by Thucydides, has a still higher claim to unimpeachable authenticity, inasmuch as the facts were more recent at the time of the publication of the work; and because, also, the strongest motives of national rivalry and civil discord were then in activity, and were in readiness to crush, on the instant, any attempted misrepresentation. The author’s hope that his work should descend to posterity, rested directly upon such an adherence to truth, on his part, as should exclude the opportunity of giving any plausibility to a charge of extensive or wilful falsification.

Xenophon’s history of Greece possesses, in part, a claim to credibility on the same ground. But the Cyropædia, on the contrary, is altogether destitute of authentication from this source; for the Greeks, at the time when the work was published, were far from being generally competent to judge of the truth of the story. The same author’s account of the expedition of Cyrus, may, in this respect, take a middle place between the two above-named works. It was not composed, as there is reason to believe, till many years after the writer’s return from Asia; and though the general facts were still matters of notoriety, the particulars could not then be universally recollected; especially as the scene of these transactions was so remote from Greece.

The works of Sallust, the Commentaries of Cæsar, the works of Tacitus, of Suetonius, of Polybius, claim, in whole or in part, the authority of popular histories, having been generally accredited as authentic by those who were well acquainted with the facts they contain.

But, excepting some small portions, or particular facts, the works of Diodorus, of Dionysius the Halicarnassian, of Nepos, of Ælian, of Paterculus, of Curtius, of Plutarch, of Arrian, of Appian, of Pausanias, and many others, are to be regarded only as learned compilations, the claim to authenticity of which is of an indirect kind.

CHAPTER XI.
EXCEPTIONS TO WHICH THE TESTIMONY OF HISTORIANS, ON PARTICULAR POINTS, MAY BE LIABLE.

From the very nature of the case the authenticity of an historical work can be affirmed only in a restricted sense, and must be understood to be open to exceptions in particular instances. Such exceptions may be taken without impeaching the character of the writer for veracity, or even for general accuracy. It is easy to suppose that he may have been imposed upon in certain cases, by his informants; or he may have reported things that were currently believed in his time, without thinking himself personally pledged for their truth: he may not have thought himself called upon, as an historian, to discuss questions which might more properly be taken up by philosophers; or he may merely have been negligent—here and there, in the course of a voluminous work. Yet allowances of this sort must, as it is evident, be confined to cases of an accidental kind, and should only then be brought forward in the way of apology for a writer’s mistakes, when he is giving an account of facts that were not immediately known to himself. For in a narrative of events, of which the writer professes himself to have had a personal knowledge, we must either admit his veracity, and with it the truth of the facts; or we must deny both.

The first point to be considered, when the affirmation of an historian in a particular instance is doubted, is—The nature of the fact in question.

1. If, for example, it be a question of numbers, measures, or dates, it is always to be remembered—as already remarked—that a peculiar uncertainty attaches to these matters, in ancient authors, owing to the method of notation by letters, which were easily mistaken, one for another. The numbers of which armies were composed—the numbers of the slain in battle—the population of cities—the revenues of states—the distances of places—the weight or measure of bodies, and computations of time, must, therefore, always be held open to question, as to what was actually intended and written by the author: this doubt may be entertained without in the least derogating from the credit of the work in which they occur. Besides the probable corruption of copies in such instances, it is to be remembered as to many of the particulars above named, that they are far more liable to uncertainty, or mistake, than other facts, so that scarcely any degree of diligence and care on the part of an historian, will entirely secure him from errors on such points.

2. Geographical details, descriptions of the objects of natural history, or accounts of natural phenomena, must also, generally, be considered as open to a degree of uncertainty, on account of the imperfect information upon such subjects, which was possessed by the ancients. And yet the names and relative distances of places in all the countries bordering upon the Mediterranean sea, as reported by ancient geographers and historians, have been to so great an extent authenticated by the researches of modern scholars, that any apparent inconsistencies should not hastily be assumed as proofs of ignorance. But as to whatever relates to countries remote from Greece and Italy, or lying beyond the bounds of the Persian, Macedonian, Carthaginian, and Roman empires, it must of course be received with hesitation. Many of these descriptions of remote countries, when they come to be compared with the accounts of modern travellers, afford, at once, amusing instances of exaggeration, and striking attestations of the substantial authenticity of the works in which they occur. For the coincidence of these accounts, in many respects, with the facts, as they are now fully known, puts it beyond doubt that the historian had actually conversed with natives of those countries, or with travellers; while at the same time the distortion of the picture is precisely such as might be expected from the channels through which the information was derived.

3. The descriptions so frequently met with in ancient writers, of monstrous men or animals—griffins—dragons—hydras—pygmies—giants; or of trees bearing golden fruit, of fountains flowing with perfumed liquids, or even with the precious metals, may, in most cases, be now traced to their origin in actual facts, which, passing to the writer through the medium of ignorant, fanciful, or interested reporters, assumed the characteristic extravagance of fables. On occasions of this kind it is much more becoming to an intelligent student of history to make search, among the stores of modern science, for the probable source of such accounts, than to pass them by with the sneer of indolent scepticism. Some writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took so much offence at certain passages of this sort in the history of Herodotus, as to treat the entire work of that industrious and generally accurate writer with contempt, as if it were little better than a repository of fables. But these rash censures now fall back upon themselves; for modern travellers, in visiting the countries described by the father of history, find frequent occasion for noticing the correctness of his statements, or their substantial truth, even in those descriptions or relations which may seem the most open to suspicion.

4. In narrating or describing natural phenomena, such as meteors, tempests, eruptions of volcanoes, earthquakes, eclipses, all that is needed is to remove from the narrative of the historian those explanations, or those decorative phrases, by which he endeavoured to accommodate such occurrences to the political events of the moment, at the suggestion of popular superstitions.

And here we may take occasion to point out a remarkable difference, which forms a characteristic distinction in comparing the Jewish writers with those of other nations, as to the nature of those marvellous or supernatural facts which they describe. The marvellous events reported by the Greek and Roman authors may, with few exceptions, be classed under two heads; namely—allegorical and poetical combinations, which were so obviously fabulous as to ask for no credence, and to demand no scrutiny; or they were mere exaggerations, distortions, or misapplications of natural objects or phenomena. But the Jewish historians and poets do not describe, as actually existing, any such allegorical prodigies; and their descriptions of real animals, are either simply exact, or they are evidently poetical (like those in the book of Job), but they are not fabulous. They do not throw a supernatural colouring over ordinary phenomena, or convert plain facts into prodigies. The supernatural events they record—as matters of history, are such deviations from the standing order of natural causes, as leave us no alternative between a peremptory denial of the veracity of the writers, or a submission to their affirmation of divine agency.

The freedom of the Jewish historians, poets, and prophets, from those admixtures of the marvellous and the natural, with which other ancient writers abound, is one of the most remarkable of their characteristics. Their descriptions of human nature are neither heroical, nor fantastic; their narratives of human affairs are of the simplest complexion, and they are strictly consistent with the known modes of the time and country. Nor is our assent taxed, on any occasion, except when an event is recorded which, unless it had actually taken place, could not have been affirmed by any but reckless impostors.

Besides those prodigies which are met with in profane historians, and that only require to be freed from exaggerations appended to natural events by ignorance, poetry, or superstition, there are other accounts which are not to be satisfactorily explained so readily, and which call for the exercise of some discrimination. They are of a kind that must be accounted either altogether false, or else must imply, in some sense, a supernatural agency. Of the former kind may well be reckoned all, or nearly all, those alleged supernatural occurrences which no doubt were contrived to give credit to an established superstition, or to subserve the designs of statesmen or commanders, and which, in most cases, rested exclusively upon the testimony of priests. On the other hand, there are recorded, in the pages of profane historians, some few facts, apparently beyond the range of natural causes, which cannot be rejected as untrue, unless we do violence to the soundest principles of evidence, and which will not be treated with uninquisitive contempt, except by a purblind scepticism, that is more nearly allied to credulity than to true philosophy. These peculiar cases demand a far more full and particular consideration than it is compatible with the design of this volume to bestow upon them.

5. The political habits and tastes of the Greeks and Romans, induced their historians to supply the personages of their story with formal speeches, on all remarkable occasions; for oratory was the spring and life of every political movement; and as the machine of government could not in fact be made to go without the impelling force of harangues, history must not seem to omit them. Yet there is little reason to believe that authentic reports of public speeches were often, if ever, in the possession of historians. Indeed, these brilliant portions of the history are often so much in the manner of the author, as to leave the reader in no doubt to whom to attribute them. Nevertheless it may be imagined that, on some memorable occasions, the very words of a short speech, or the general purport of an oration, was remembered and recorded, and so was worked into the speech, as framed by the historian.

A compliance with the taste of the times seems also to have led some writers to use means for diverting the attention of their readers, and for relieving the burden of the narrative, by introducing digressions, often of a trivial kind, which, though not announced as mere embellishments, and which perhaps were not purely fictitious, are evidently not entitled to an equal degree of confidence with the main circumstances of the story.

6. The secret motives of public men, or the hidden causes of great events, are not the proper subjects of history, which is concerned only with such facts as may be truly and fairly known. The disquisitions of an historian on such topics are therefore to be excepted against; for when he so forsakes his function, he must expect to be forsaken by his reader; his errors, on such points, do not impeach his veracity; although they lower our opinion of his judgment.

7. Very few facts of importance, such as form the proper subjects of history, rest entirely upon the testimony of a single historian, or are incapable of being directly, or remotely confirmed, by some kind of coincident evidence. Whenever therefore a question arises relative to the truth of a particular statement, recourse must be had, either to the testimony of contemporary writers, or to the evidence of existing monuments. But even if all such means of corroboration should fail, and if we meet with a perplexing silence where we might expect to find confirmation, we are by no means justified in rejecting the unsupported testimony, merely on the ground of this want of correlative support. Many instances may be adduced of the most extraordinary silence of historians relative to facts with which they must have been acquainted, and which seemed to lie directly in the course of their narrative. Important facts are mentioned by no ancient writer, though they are unquestionably established by the evidence of existing inscriptions, coins, statues, or buildings. There are also facts mentioned only by some one historian, which happen to be attested by an incidental coincidence with some relic of antiquity lately brought to light; if this relic had remained in its long obscurity, such facts might (we see with how little reason) have been disputed.

Nothing can be more fallacious than an inference drawn from the silence of historians relative to particular facts. For a full, comprehensive, and, if the phrase may be used, a business-like method of writing history, in which nothing important—nothing which a well-informed reader will look for, must be omitted, is the produce of modern improvements in thinking and writing. The general diffusion of knowledge, and the activity of criticism, occasion a much higher demand in matters of information to be made upon writers than was thought of in ancient times. A full and exact communication of facts has come to be valued more highly than any mere beauties of style; at least, no beauties of style are allowed to atone for palpable deficiencies in matters of fact. The moderns must be taught—and pleased; but the ancients would be pleased, and taught. Ancient writers, and historians not less than others, seem to have formed their notions of prose composition very much upon the model of poetry, which, in most languages, was the earliest kind of literature. As their epics were histories, so, in some sense, their histories were epics. Such particulars, therefore, were taken up in the course of the narrative, as seemed best to accord with the abstract idea of the work—not always those which a rigid adherence to a comprehensive plan would have made it necessary to bring forward.

8. The influence of personal or party prejudices is indefinite; and as it may distort the representations of an historian almost unconsciously to himself, and without impugning his general integrity, so will it, in most instances, be difficult, especially after the lapse of ages, to discover the extent to which the operation of such prejudices should be allowed for. But if it cannot be ascertained how much of the colouring of the picture is to be attributed to the medium through which an historian exhibits his characters, yet the general hues of that medium will hardly escape the observation of an intelligent reader; and when once observed, the illusion is destroyed.

But in relation to the influence of prejudices of this sort, ancient historians unquestionably appear to advantage when compared with those of modern times. Instances of equanimity might be cited from the Greek historians to which few parallels could be adduced, drawn from the pages of modern writers. Like the sculptures of the same people, the works of the Greek historians, though not wanting in the distinctive characters, or the moving energy of life, present an aspect from which the sublimity of repose is never lost. These writers seem to have been conscious that they were holding up the picture of their times to the eyes of mankind in all ages: they forgot, therefore, the passions and interests of the moment.

With ourselves, the instantaneous diffusion of books through all ranks of the community, places a modern author too nearly in the presence of his contemporaries to allow him to think much of posterity. The clamour of public opinion rings around his seclusion: his situation, in its essential circumstances, is almost the same as that of the public speaker—the din of the crowd fills his thoughts, and he almost forgets the distant fame which his genius might command. This nearness of his audience offers therefore to a modern writer every excitement and every inducement to the indulgence of party misrepresentations. If it were not for the correcting influences of a free press, nothing worthy of the name of history would be produced in modern times.

9. That the Greeks were not in fact much inferior to the representations given of them by their historians, the existing monuments of their philosophy, of their poetry, and of their arts, sufficiently attest. Indeed if we pass from an examination of these monuments and remains to the perusal of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, we shall be far from thinking that a tone of exaggerated encomium is to be charged upon those writers. From the pages of the historians alone, we should fail to form an adequate idea of the perfection that was attained in all departments of literature and art by the people whose political affairs they narrate. Scarcely half of the history of Greece, in a full and philosophical sense of the term, is to be gathered from its historians:—we must seek for it rather in the remains of its literature at large,—in museums, and cabinets, and among the ruins that still bespread its soil.

It is not therefore this sort of general misrepresentation that is to be suspected in the Greek historians; for more is made certain by other means than is explicitly affirmed by them. Yet it has been supposed that, in their accounts of military affairs, the Greek historians, in order to enhance the glory of their countrymen in repelling the Persian invasions, have exaggerated the power and extent of the Asiatic monarchy, and the numbers of the armies with which those of Greece had to contend. Some amount of misrepresentation, of this kind, may have been admitted. But yet the pictures given by the Greek writers of the wealth and resources of the Persian power—of the puerile ambition of its monarchs—of the countless hosts which they drove before them, by the lash, into Scythia, Egypt, and Europe—conquering nations rather by devastation than by military conduct—by the mouths, more than by the swords of their armies, are so strikingly similar to unquestionable facts in the later history of the Asiatic empires, that, as the one cannot be doubted, the other need not be deemed incredible.

10. The arrogance with which, under the term barbarians, the Greek writers speak of all nations that were not of Greek extraction, naturally suggests the belief that we must not expect to derive from them a just idea of the civilization of the surrounding nations. In truth, not a few indications may be gathered from other sources, which authorize the belief that, in communities not very distant from Greece itself, or its colonies, a degree of intelligence and of refinement existed of which it was their shame to be ignorant, or their greater shame to have taken so little notice.

11. With the Romans it was perhaps less from mere national vanity, than from a dictate of that deep-plotted policy by which they supported their unbounded pretensions, that they were induced to misrepresent the resources and the conduct of the nations on whose necks they trampled. This policy would often produce misrepresentations of a contrary kind to those suggested by national vanity. That universal empire was the right of the Roman arms was the principle of the state: a reverse of fortune therefore was not simply a calamity—it was a seeming impeachment of the high claims of the republic. The nations must not think that their masters could anywhere find equals or rivals in courage or military skill. A defeat hurt the political faith of the Roman citizen more than it alarmed his fears; and he would rather waive the glory of having broken an arm of equal strength with his own, than confess that there was anywhere an arm of equal strength, to resist his will. He would choose to sustain the aggravated shame of having been beaten by an inferior, rather than redeem a part of his dishonour by acknowledging that he had encountered a superior. A writer therefore could not do full justice to the courage, conduct and successes of the enemies of Rome, without offering such an outrage to the common feeling as would have amounted almost to treason against the state. Modern historical criticism—exercised by such a writer as Niebuhr, has sufficed to remove from early Roman history a very large amount of the misstatements and the exaggerations which Livy and his predecessors had accumulated around it.

CHAPTER XII.
CONFIRMATIONS OF THE EVIDENCE OF ANCIENT HISTORIANS, DERIVABLE FROM INDEPENDENT SOURCES.

Most of the principal facts mentioned by ancient historians, as well as many particulars of less importance, are confirmed by evidence that is altogether independent, both in its nature, and in the channels through which it has reached us. In truth, although the narratives of historians serve to connect and explain the entire mass of information that has descended to modern times, relative to the nations of remote antiquity, they are far from being the sole sources of that information:—perhaps they hardly furnish so much as a half of the materials of history. These independent sources of information may be classed under the following heads:—