With the downfall of the Roman Empire, the organised book-trade of Rome and of the great cities of the Roman provinces came to an end. This trade had of necessity been dependent upon an effective system of communication and of transportation, a system which required for its maintenance the well built and thoroughly guarded roads of the empire; while it also called for the existence of a wealthy and cultivated leisure class, a class which during the periods of civil war and of barbaric invasions rapidly disappeared. Long before the reign of the last of the Roman emperors, original literary production had in great part ceased and the trade in the books of an earlier period had been materially curtailed; and by 476, when Augustulus was driven out by the triumphant Odovacar, the literary activities of the capital were very nearly at a close. In the following study I have taken up the account of the production of books in Europe from the time of the downfall of the Empire of the West. I have endeavoured to show by what means, after the disappearance of the civilisation of the Roman State, were preserved the fragments of classic literature that have remained for the use of modern readers, and to what agencies were due the maintenance, throughout the confusion and social disorganisation of the early Middle Ages, of any intellectual interest or literary activities. I find such agencies supplied in the first place by the scribes of the Roman Church, the organisation of which had replaced as a central civilising influence the power of the lost Roman Empire. The _scriptoria_ of the monasteries rendered the service formerly given by the copyists of the book-shops or of the country houses, while their _armaria_, or book-chests, had to fill the place of the destroyed or scattered libraries of the Roman cities or the Roman villas. The work of the scribes was now directed not by an Augustus, a Mæcenas, or an Atticus, but by a Cassiodorus, a Benedict, or a Gregory, and the incentive to literary labour was no longer the laurel crown of the circus, the favours of a patron, or the _honoraria_ of the publishers, but the glory of God and the service of the Church. Upon these agencies depended the existence of literature during the seven long centuries between the fall of the Western Empire and the beginning of the work of the universities, and, in fact, for many years after the foundation of the universities of Bologna and of Paris, the book-production of the monasteries continued to be of material importance in connection with the preservation of literature.