English subtlety, which illumined by the lights of former times is always sending forth fresh rays of truth, produce anything to the advancement of science or the declaration of the faith, this was instantly poured still fresh into our ears, ungarbled by any babbler, unmutilated by any trifler, but passing straight from the purest of wine-presses into the vats of our memory to be clarified. But whenever it happened that we turned aside to the cities and places where the mendicants we have mentioned had their convents, we did not disdain to visit their libraries and any other repositories of books; nay, there we found heaped up amid the utmost poverty the utmost riches of wisdom. We discovered in their fardels and baskets not only crumbs falling from the masters' table for the dogs, but the shewbread without leaven and the bread of angels having in it all that is delicious; and indeed the garners of Joseph full of corn, and all the spoil of the Egyptians, and the very precious gifts which Queen Sheba brought to Solomon. These men are as ants ever preparing their meat in the summer, and ingenious bees continually fabricating cells of honey. They are successors of Bezaleel in devising all manner of workmanship in silver and gold and precious stones for decorating the temple of the Church. They are cunning embroiderers, who fashion the breastplate and ephod of the high priest and all the various vestments of the priests. They fashion the curtains of linen and hair and coverings of ram's skins dyed red with which to adorn the tabernacle of the Church militant. They are husbandmen that sow, oxen treading out corn, sounding trumpets, shining Pleiades and stars remaining in their courses, which cease not to fight against Sisera. And to pay due regard to truth, without prejudice to the judgment of any, although they lately at the eleventh hour have entered the lord's vineyard, as the books that are so fond of us eagerly declared in our sixth chapter, they have added more in this brief hour to the stock of the sacred books than all the other vine-dressers; following in the footsteps of Paul, the last to be called but the first in preaching, who spread the gospel of Christ more widely than all others. Of these men, when we were raised to the episcopate we had several of both orders, viz., the Preachers and Minors, as personal attendants and companions at our board, men distinguished no less in letters than in morals, who devoted themselves with unwearied zeal to the correction, exposition, tabulation, and compilation of various volumes. But although we have acquired a very numerous store of ancient as well as modern works by the manifold intermediation of the religious, yet we must laud the Preachers with special praise, in that we have found them above all the religious most freely communicative of their stores without jealousy, and proved them to be imbued with an almost Divine liberality, not greedy but fitting possessors of luminous wisdom.