Christian poets, too, were not lacking. From the time of Lactantius onwards, the quantity of metrical Latin work done by churchmen was very large; and the lyrical yearning inherent in all societies had produced an immense hymnology, which comprised a great deal of real poetry--most poetical and most charming when least Ciceronian. Here, again, was rich material for the copyists of the scriptorium; and both Hymnals and Lawbooks lent their aid towards the gradual tendency of students to go back and investigate the ancient sources of literature and philosophy and history. Pliny had never been wholly forgotten, even in the most anti-pagan times, and the treatises on natural science which had appeared among the schoolmen, all stimulated curiosity to learn what had been written before the days of Constantine. The result of these intellectual tendencies made the fourteenth century a dawn of the Renaissance, and with the beginning of the fifteenth a large body of heathen literature was annexed to the libraries of universities, scholars, and monasteries, giving increased employment to the transcribers who were at that time busy all over Europe. It was in the thirteenth century that the monks and the priests lost their monopoly of the practice of ornamental writing; in the fourteenth century every great city had its ateliers of calligraphers unconnected with the Church; and when the fifteenth century arrived the trained citizen penmen, who formed crafts throughout Europe, were probably not inferior in number to the scribes who worked in ecclesiastical edifices. _The Illuminated MSS. of the Middle Ages_ This division of our matter is the largest, and is also the most interesting to the majority of students and {59}collectors. In beginning it, some repetition will be necessary in order to bring the subject as a whole before the reader.