One of the first of these scribes, old Cassiodorus of Ravenna, writes: “All who sing form but a single voice, and we may mingle our notes with those of the angels, though we may not hear them.” I am sure that was the sentiment which finally turned this old statesman from the world, even though he did not retire till after the death of Theodoric, his patron. Perhaps the career of a statesman prepared him to be a statesman of the world of letters; at any rate, when he repaired to the cloister he gathered together, according to his lights, the best books of his world, and especially enjoined upon the monks the noble duty of multiplying them. All this was some hundred years before Saint Columba’s time, but angel voices carry, and I do believe in their highest moments the ignorant, undeveloped scribes of the old Irish monasteries vaguely echoed ideals like those of Cassiodorus. These scribes came to feel a certain ownership in the great Bibles on which they worked. At the end of each section of the old Book of Durrow its scribe smuggled in his petition that all who take the book in hand might pray for him. I have known a merry old scribe to insert a jingle in very bad Latin at the end of a chapter, indicating that after so much good work he should be rewarded with a drink. The jolly old monk has always appealed to me most unreasonably. Within the century of the making of the old Book of Kells in Ireland, stirring old Charlemagne brought a semblance of order to the land of the Gaul and the Frank and, “that requests should not be made to God in bad language,” he regulated copists and reproductions by law; he ordered holy books elaborately adorned, and collected, to the best of his ability, artists for that purpose, thereby leaving his mark on the books of his time and of some generations following, which are technically known as Carlovingians. Indeed, as a bibliophile Charlemagne shows the most charming side of his character. In his enthusiasm he went to work and learned to read, but he never could succeed in learning to write. As might be expected, Carlovingians are mechanically decorated. They show Byzantine importation rather than the loving development of an early and original art. We still have a couple of pages of the Amiens copy of a work written by the Abbot of Fulda during Charlemagne’s reign. One page is covered by a lone figure, without ground or background, of Louis the Pious with text printed all over it. (Not that in the Dark Ages anybody read between the lines; that they failed to do so was their greatest difficulty.) Then other Carlovingians are examples of the dyers’ art, being written in gold on purple vellum, like the “Golden Gospels” which one thousand one hundred years later proved such an excellent speculation on Wall street. But that is unquestionably “another story.”