Copyists were much employed in the Roman Empire from the time of the
Scipios up to the inundation of the barbarians.

The Greeks occupied themselves much in transcribing towards the time of
Amyntas, Philip and Alexander; they continued this craft especially in
Alexandria.

This craft is somewhat ungrateful. The merchants always paid the authors
and the copyists very badly. It took two years of assiduous labour for a
copyist to transcribe the Bible well on vellum. What time and what
trouble for copying correctly in Greek and Latin the works of Origen, of
Clement of Alexandria, and of all those other authors called "fathers."

The poems of Homer were long so little known that Pisistratus was the
first who put them in order, and who had them transcribed in Athens,
about five hundred years before the era of which we are making use.

To-day there are not perhaps a dozen copies of the Veidam and the
Zend-Avesta in the whole of the East.

You would not have found a single book in the whole of Russia in 1700,
with the exception of Missals and a few Bibles in the homes of aged men
drunk on brandy.

To-day people complain of a surfeit: but it is not for readers to
complain; the remedy is easy; nothing forces them to read. It is not any
the more for authors to complain. Those who make the crowd must not cry
that they are being crushed. Despite the enormous quantity of books, how
few people read! and if one read profitably, one would see the