but we need not linger over the beautiful papyri, which are silent
books to all but a few Egyptologists. Greece, out of all her tomes,
has left us but a few ill-written papyri. Roman and early Byzantine
art are represented by a "Virgil," and fragments of an "Iliad"; the
drawings in the latter have been reproduced in a splendid volume
(Milan 1819), and shew Greek art passing into barbarism. The
illumination of MSS. was a favourite art in the later empire, and is
said to have been practised by Boethius. The iconoclasts of the
Eastern empire destroyed the books which contained representations
of saints and of the persons of the Trinity, and the monk Lazarus, a
famous artist, was cruelly tortured for his skill in illuminating
sacred works. The art was decaying in Western Europe when
Charlemagne sought for painters of MSS. in England and Ireland,
where the monks, in their monasteries, had developed a style with
original qualities. The library of Corpus Christi at Cambridge,
contains some of the earliest and most beautiful of extant English
MSS. These parchments, stained purple or violet, and inscribed with
characters of gold; are too often beyond the reach of the amateur
for whom we write. The MSS. which he can hope to acquire are
neither very early nor very sumptuous, and, as a rule, MSS. of
secular books are apt to be out of his reach.

Yet a collection of MSS. has this great advantage over a collection
of printed books, that every item in it is absolutely unique, no two
MSS. being ever really the same. This circumstance alone would
entitle a good collection of MSS. to very high consideration on the
part of book-collectors. But, in addition to the great expense of
such a collection, there is another and even more serious drawback.
It is sometimes impossible, and is often extremely difficult, to
tell whether a MS. is perfect or not.