[2] This Gilles Malet, who was also the king's reader, had great strength of character; he is thus described by Christine de Pise:--"Souverainement bien lisoit, et bien ponttoit, et entendens homs estoit;" "he read sovereignly well, with good punctuation, and was an understanding man." She has recorded a personal anecdote of him. One day a fatal accident happened to his child, but such was the discipline of official duties, that he did not interrupt his attendance on the king at the usual hour of reading. The king having afterwards heard of the accident which had bereaved the father of his child, observed, "If the intrepidity of this man had not exceeded that which nature bestows upon ordinary men, his paternal emotion would not have allowed him to conceal his misfortune." [3] The reader may form some idea of the discordant arrangement of a volume of manuscripts by the following entries:--"Un Livre qui commence de Genesis, et aussi traite des fais Julius Cesar, appelle Suetoine." "Un Livre en François, en un volume, qui ce commence de Genesis, et traite du fait des Romains, de la vie des SS. Peres Hermites, et de Merlin." [4] "Hist. de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions," tome i. 421, 12mo. [5] It has, within the last few years, been added to the British Museum.--ED. [6] _Dame_ was the lady of the knight; the _Damoiselle_, the wife of an esquire; _Dameisel_, or _Damoiseau_, was a youth of noble extraction, but who had not yet attained to knighthood.--Rocquefort, "Glossaire de la Langue Romane." [7] Ritson's "Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy," lxxxi. [8] See an "Essay on English Monastic Libraries," by that learned and ingenious antiquary, the Rev. Joseph Hunter. [9] Some of these extraordinary window-catalogues of the monastic library of St. Albans were found in the cloisters and presbytery of that monastery, and are preserved in the "Monasticon Anglicanum." [10] Dibdin's "Bibliographical Decameron," iii. 245. HENRY THE SEVENTH. There was a state of transition in our literature, both classical and vernacular, which deserves our notice in the progress of the genius of the nation. A prudent sovereign in the seventh Henry, amid factions rather joined together than cemented, gave a semblance of repose to a turbulent land, exhausted by its convulsions. A martial rudeness still lingered among the great; and we discover by a curious conversation which the learned Pace held with some of the gentry, with whom, perhaps, he had indiscreetly remonstrated, attempting to impress on their minds the advantages of study, that his advice was indignantly rejected. Such pursuits seemed to them unmanly, and intolerable impediments in the practice of those more active arts of life which alone were worthy of one of gentle blood; their fathers had been good knights without this idling toil of reading.