The Great Book-Collectors | Page 3

we cannot discern many learned men, but we know that there
was a multitude ready to assist in the preservation of learning. The
figures of three or four true book-lovers stand out amid the crowd of
dilettanti. St. Pamphilus was a student at the legal University of
Beyrout before he was received into the Church: he devoted himself
afterwards to the school of sacred learning which he established at
Cæsarea in Palestine. Here he gathered together about 30,000 volumes,
almost all consisting of the works of the Fathers. His personal labour
was given to the works of Origen, in whose mystical doctrine he had
become a proficient at Alexandria. The martyrdom of Pamphilus
prevented the completion of his own elaborate commentaries. He left
the library to the Church of Cæsarea, under the superintendence of his
friend Eusebius. St. Jerome paid a visit to the collection while he was
still enrolled on the list of bibliophiles. He had bought the best books to
be found at Trêves and Aquileia; he had seen the wealth of Rome, and
was on his way to the oriental splendour of Constantinople: it is from
him that we first hear of the gold and silver inks and the Tyrian purple
of the vellum. He declared that he had never seen anything to compare
with the library of Pamphilus; and when he was given twenty-five
volumes of Origen in the martyr's delicate writing, he vowed that he
felt richer than if he had found the wealth of Croesus.
The Emperor Julian was a pupil of Eusebius, and became reader for a
time in the Church at Cæsarea. He was passionately fond of books, and
possessed libraries at Antioch and Constantinople, as well as in his
beloved 'Lutetia' on the island in the Seine. A sentence from one of his
letters was carved over the door of his library at Antioch: 'Some love
horses, or hawks and hounds, but I from my boyhood have pined with a
desire for books.'

It is said that another of his libraries was burned by his successor
Jovian in a parody of Alexander's Feast. It is true, at any rate, that the
book-butcher set fire to the books at Antioch as part of his revenge
against the Apostate. One is tempted to dwell on the story of these
massacres. In many a war, as an ancient bibliophile complained, have
books been dispersed abroad, 'dismembered, stabbed, and mutilated':
'they were buried in the earth or drowned in the sea, and slain by all
kinds of slaughter.' 'How much of their blood the warlike Scipio shed:
how many on the banishment of Boethius were scattered like sheep
without a shepherd!' Perhaps the subject should be isolated in a
separate volume, where the rude Omar, and Jovian, and the despoilers
of the monasteries, might be pilloried. Seneca would be indicted for his
insult to Cleopatra's books: Sir Thomas Browne might be in danger for
his saying, that 'he could with patience behold the urn and ashes of the
Vatican, could he with a few others recover the perished leaves of
Solomon.' He might escape by virtue of his saving clause, and some
excuse would naturally be found for Seneca; but the rest might be
treated like those Genoese criminals who were commemorated on
marble tablets as 'the worst of mankind.'
For several generations after the establishment of the Eastern Empire,
Constantinople was the literary capital of the world and the main
repository of the arts and sciences. Mr. Middleton has lately shown us
in his work upon Illuminated Manuscripts that Persia and Egypt, as
well as the Western Countries, 'contributed elements both of design and
technical skill which combined to create the new school of Byzantine
art.' Constantinople, he tells us, became for several centuries the main
centre for the production of manuscripts. Outside the domain of art we
find little among the Romans of the East that can in any sense be called
original. They were excellent at an epitome or a lexicon, and were very
successful as librarians. The treasures of antiquity, as Gibbon has said,
were imparted in such extracts and abridgments 'as might amuse the
curiosity without oppressing the indolence of the public.' The Patriarch
Photius stands out as a literary hero among the commentators and
critics of the ninth century. That famous book-collector, in analysing
the contents of his library for an absent brother, became the preserver
of many of the most valuable classics. As Commander of the Guard he

led the life of a peaceful student: as Patriarch of Byzantium his
turbulence rent the fabric of Christendom, and he was 'alternately
excommunicated and absolved by the synods of the East and West.' We
owe the publication of the work called The Myriad of Books to the
circumstance that he was appointed