One of the borrowings from the pagan schools which the Church found most useful was shorthand. The bishops had their ‘notarii’ just as much as the officials of the imperial Civil Service. They were employed to take down the proceedings of the Councils, the _acta_ of the martyrs,[1070] and the speeches and sermons of the prominent clergy. Their prevalence has been the plague of commentators, and has contributed much to the formlessness of Christian writing. For the scribe would take down the bishop’s speech verbatim and copy it out as it stood. There was no revision or rearrangement, and many errors and much diffuseness was the result, as in the Homilies of Hilary of Poitiers.[1071] Hilary of Arles, Honoratus tells us, used to have a ‘notarius’. ‘Sedili mensaque apposita liber ingerebatur et retia,[1072] adstante notario. Liber praebebat animo cibum, manus nectendi velocitate currebant, notarii simul ferebantur articuli et oculus paginam percurrebat.’[1073] Evidently the possession of a ‘notarius’ did not mean a decrease in activity, mental or otherwise. Similarly, Jerome on a certain occasion was compelled by his friend Ausonius to send for his secretary and dictate a letter to the bereaved Julian, and ‘as the words fell swiftly from his lips, they were swiftly overtaken by the hand of the writer’.[1074] Again, he describes the vigour of his secretarial department in terms of martial ardour and excitement: ‘ecce noster Ausonius coepit schedulas flagitare, urgere notarios, et hinnitu ferventis equi, ingenioli mei festinus arguere tarditatem’.[1075] That shorthand was connected with the schools is clear enough from Prudentius.[1076] He tells us of a tablet in a church at Forum Cornelii representing the martyr Cassianus who had been a teacher of stenography. Praefuerat studiis puerilibus, et grege multo saeptus magister litterarum sederat. verba notis brevibus comprendere multa peritus raptimque punctis dicta praecipitibus sequi. Transcribers of books were patronized by wealthy families, and apparently sent from one house to another. Sidonius[1077] recommends to Ruricus one who had copied out the Heptateuch, and had on sale also a copy of the Prophets, which he had edited. The man was evidently of low social standing, for Sidonius leaves it to Ruricus to fix the price of the work; yet he must have had a considerable education to have been able to edit the Prophets. We hear also of a citizen of Clermont who had wormed out of the copyist or bookseller (_scriba sive bibliopola_) of Remigius at Rheims a copy of the latter’s Declamations,[1078] which shows that the scribe was sometimes also the librarian.