Although all the larger ancient libraries, such, for example, as those of Alexandria, of Constantinople, of Athens, and of Rome, were destroyed by the fanaticism of barbarian conquerors; yet so extensive a diffusion of the most celebrated works had previously taken place, throughout the Roman empire, and beyond its limits, that all parts of Europe and Western Asia abounded with smaller collections, or with single works in the hands of private persons. When learning had almost disappeared among the people, monasteries and religious houses became the chief receptacles of books; for almost every such establishment included individuals who still cultivated literature and the sciences with ardour; and who found no difficulty in amassing almost any quantity of this generally neglected property. Happily for literature, religious houses were places of greater security than even the strongholds of the nobles, or the palaces of kings, which by conquest or revolution were, from time to time, violently rent from their possessors. Meantime, these sacred seclusions were usually respected, even by the fiercest invaders. Through a long course of ages, monasteries were occupied by an order of men who succeeded each other in a far more tranquil course of transition than has taken place in any other instance, that might be named. The property of each establishment (and its literary property was always highly prized) passed down, from age to age, as if under the hand of a permanent proprietor, and it was therefore subjected to fewer dispersions or destructions than the mutability of human affairs ordinarily permits. Every church, and every convent and monastery had its library, its librarian, and its other officers, employed in the conservation of the books. Connected with the library was the _Scriptorium_--the hall or chamber where the elder or the educated monks employed themselves in making copies of such books as were falling into decay; or of such as there was still some demand for, in the open world. By means such as these it was that the literature of more enlightened ages has been preserved from extinction; and when at length learning revived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a large portion of those long-hoarded volumes flowed into the collections of the munificent founders of libraries, and there, having become known to the learned, they were speedily consigned to the immortal custody of the press.