There were some complaints that the Friars cared too much for the
contents and too little for the condition of their volumes. The
Carmelites, who arrived in England after the two greater Orders, had the
reputation of being careful librarians, 'anxiously protecting their books
against dust and worms,' and ranging the manuscripts in their large room
at Oxford at first in chests and afterwards in book-cases. The
Franciscans were too ready to give and sell, to lend and spend, the
volumes that they were so keen to acquire. A Dominican was always drawn
with a book in his hand; but he would care nothing for it, if it
contained no secrets of science. Richard de Bury had much to say about
the Friars in that treatise on the love of books, 'which he fondly named
Philobiblon,' being a commendation of Wisdom and of the books wherein she
dwells. The Friars, he said, had preserved the ancient stores of
learning, and were always ready to procure the last sermon from Rome or
the newest pamphlet from Oxford. When he visited their houses in the
country-towns, and turned out their chests and book-shelves, he found
such wealth as might have lain in kings' treasuries; 'in those cupboards
and baskets are not merely the crumbs that fall from the table, but the
shew-bread which is angel's food, and corn from Egypt and the choicest
gilts of Sheba.' He gives the highest praise to the Preachers or Friars
of the Dominican Order, as being most open and ungrudging, 'and
overflowing with a with a kind of divine liberality.' But both Preachers
and Minorites, or Grey Friars, had been his pupils, his friends and
guests in his family, and they had always applied themselves with
unwearied zeal to the task of editing, indexing, and cataloguing the
volumes in the library. 'These men,' he cries, 'are the successors of
Bezaleel and the embroiderers of the ephod and breast-plate: these are
the husbandmen that sow, and the oxen that tread out the corn: they are
the blowers of the trumpets: they are the shining Pleiades and the stars
in their courses.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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