The books of those early days were written out by hand, _manuscripta_; and the profession of the copyist was one of the most numerous, honorable, and lucrative. Some booksellers employed great numbers of copyists, paying them salaries, and made their own livelihood on the profits of selling the works thus copied. There were in Rome, and in some of the great cities of Greece and of Asia, particular places where such works were sold. The rich also sometimes had slaves, prized more highly and treated more familiarly than other slaves, who were devoted by them to copying the works of antiquity and of their time, for their libraries. Government, too, employed a great many copyists for its edicts, and orators employed them in transcribing their discourses. Later, the eunuchs copied at Byzantium the chief works of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew antiquity. Finally, there were the monks, who, in the retirement of the monasteries, gave their time very much to the multiplication of books by the slow process of writing. In every great religious house, or abbey, there was an apartment called the scriptorium, or writing-room, where boys and young men were employed from morning till night in copying the singing-books of the choir, and the less valuable books of the library. Only a few of the monks copied in this large apartment, enough to give directions, and keep order among the boys and novices. Most of the “Holy Fathers,” as they chose to be styled, spent their time in the cells, transcribing Bibles and other valuable works. [Illustration] A monk copying. He has a cowl on his head, and wears the priest’s long gown with flowing sleeves. His waist is girt with a belt; and he sits bolt upright, or slightly leans forward in the most perpendicular of arm-chairs, which seems to be joined to the desk of his cell. How curiously he holds his quill and pointed ferule! His prior is cautious and methodical; for he has chained the manuscript from which the monk is copying to the wall, as if experience had taught him that he cannot overmuch trust the brothers. An author of those times would make a similar appearance, save that there would be no book before him, unless for reference.