Leland’s story of the library of the Franciscans at Oxford has been often told: it was only accessible to the warden and bachelors of divinity; was full of cobwebs, moths, and filth; and contained no books of value, the best having been surreptitiously carried away.[156] In the monastic libraries the books were contained in painted presses or almeries. In the _Abbatial_ libraries, according to the catalogues given by Leland, there were only the following classics--Cicero and Aristotle, which were common; Terence, Euclid, Quintus Curtius, Sidonius Apollinaris, Julius Frontinus, Apuleius, and Seneca. From this disregard of the classics--not to the shameful destruction only of the monastic libraries at the Dissolution--probably ensued that loss of the Decades of Livy, &c., which has been so justly lamented.[157] <g>Museum.</g>--Adjoining the abbey library, says Erasmus, “was a certain small but elegant museum, which, upon the removal of a board, exhibited a fire-place if the weather proved cold, otherwise it appeared a solid wall.[158] Coryatt saw a stuffed crocodile in an abbey”--the one solitary specimen, perhaps, of Natural History.[159] Upon the utility of profane learning in ecclesiastical studies, Petrarch has thus emphatically expressed himself:--“I know by experience,” he says, “how much human learning may contribute to give just notions, to make a man eloquent, to perfect his morals, and, what is more, to _defend_ his religion. If it be not permitted to read the poets and heathen authors, because they do not speak of CHRIST, whom they did not know, with how much more reason ought we to prohibit heretical works? Yet the defenders of the <g>Faith</g> studiously peruse them. Profane literature, like certain solid aliment, does not hurt a good stomach, only a weak one. Reading, though wholesome to a sound mind, is poison to a feeble intellect. I know that letters are no obstacles to holiness, as some pretend. There are many roads to heaven. Ignorance is that which the idle take. The sciences may produce as many saints as ignorance. And surely we ought not to compare an ignorant devotion to an enlightened piety.”[160] <g>Monastic Wit.</g>--Speaking of the wit and humour that often enliven the otherwise dull uniformity of monastic writings--“I met with the following epigram,” says Mr. Fosbroke, “in a MS. of the Ashmole library, of which I have never seen a copy; but as it was in a collection of poems made in the sixteenth century, I cannot tell its age:”-- <g>Marriage</g>, saith one, hath oft compared bin Unto a fest, where meet a public rout; Where those that are without would fain get _in_, And those that are within would fain get _out_.