Note s — Chapter IX · [a]

Charlemagne had a library at Aix-la-Chapelle, which he directed to be sold at his death for the benefit of the poor. His son Louis is said to have collected some books. But this rather confirms, on the whole, my supposition that, in some periods, no royal or private libraries existed, since there were not always princes or nobles with the spirit of Charlemagne, or even Louis the Debonair.

"We possess a catalogue," says M. Ampère (quoting d'Achery's Spicilegium, ii. 310), "of the library in the abbey of St. Riquier, written in 831; it consists of 256 volumes, some containing several works. Christian writers are in great majority; but we find also the Eclogues of Virgil, the Rhetoric of Cicero, the History of Homer, that is, the works ascribed to Dictys and Dares." Ampère, iii. 236. Can anything be lower than this, if nothing is omitted more valuable than what is mentioned? The Rhetoric of Cicero was probably the spurious books Ad Herennium. But other libraries must have been somewhat better furnished than this; else the Latin authors would have been still less known in the ninth century than they actually were.

In the gradual progress of learning, a very small number of princes thought it honourable to collect books. Perhaps no earlier instance can be mentioned than that of a most respectable man, William III., duke of Guienne, in the first part of the eleventh century. Fuit dux iste, says a contemporary writer, a pueritia doctus literis, et satis notitiam Scripturarum habuit; librorum copiam in palatio suo servavit; et si forte a frequentia causarum et tumultu vacaret, lectioni per seipsum operam dabat longioribus noctibus elucubrans in libris, donec somno vinceretur. Rec. des Hist. x. 155.