All in
tears at this miserable sight, Boccaccio went down the ladder, and asked
a monk in the cloister how those precious volumes had come to such a
pass; and the monk told him that the brothers who wanted a few pence
would take out a quire of leaves to make a little psalter for sale, and
used to cut off the margins to make 'briefs,' which they sold to the
women.
Poggio himself has described his discovery at the Abbey of St. Gall. 'By
good fortune,' he says, 'we were at Constance without anything to do, and
it occurred to us to go to the monastery about twenty miles off to see
the place where the Quintilian was shut up.' The Abbey had been founded
by the Irish missionaries who destroyed the idols of Suabia, when
according to the ancient legend the mountain-demon vainly called on the
spirit of the lake to join in resisting the foe. Its library had been
celebrated in the ninth century, when the Hungarian terror fell upon
Europe, and the barbarian armies in one and the same day 'laid in ashes
the monastery of St. Gall and the city of Bremen on the shores of the
Northern ocean'; but the books had been fortunately removed to the Abbey
of Reichenau on an island in the Rhine. 'We went to the place,' said
Poggio, 'to amuse ourselves and to look at the books. Among them we found
the Quintilian safe and sound, but all coated with dust. The books were
by no means housed as they deserved, but were all in a dark and noisome
place at the foot of a tower, into which one would not cast a criminal
condemned to death.
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