Note 48 — Chapter II

“Six months,” the Worthy Jacobite says, “the 4000 baths of the city were heated with the volumes of paper and parchment.” These volumes must have been bulky indeed, and must have contained a surprising amount of latent heat, considering that, even admitting the library to have existed at the time, and conceding to it the largest number of volumes claimed by the most extravagant writers, viz., 720,000, one single volume per day must have sufficed to heat a public bath! Verily, verily, history is made the most inexact of all sciences. The flames which Cæsar was compelled to kindle in his defence, in the Bruchion (the Belgravia or Tyburnia of the city of Alexander); the havoc and depredation committed by the Alexandrian mob during the troubles of the shoes (so called from the circumstance that these terrible troubles, which are said to have lasted above twelve years [from 261 to 273 A.D.], were first occasioned by a dispute between a soldier and a townsman about a pair of shoes); and the destruction inflicted on the Bruchion by Aurelian, in 273, cannot have left much behind of that portion of the splendid library of the Ptolemies which was kept in the museum. And the other portion of it, which was kept in the Temple of Serapis, to which latter place it is most probable the celebrated Pergamese library, presented by Marcus Antonius to Cleopatra, had also been sent, was totally destroyed in 389, in the reign of Theodosius I., by a bigoted Christian mob, under the leadership of the Archbishop Theophilus, a much more ignorant and brutal zealot than either Omar or Amru.