10 Rey. J. H. Topp on some Fragments of 
tised in all subsequent centuries down to the beginning of the eighteenth, although, 
of course, it began to decline after the invention of paper and other more con- 
venient materials. 
It is well known that among the ancient Greeks and Romans, tablets of this 
kind were in use, and particularly that they were employed for the very purpose 
for which that now before us appears to have been used, namely, to teach letters 
and writing in grammar schools. The ancient tables, however, were often much 
larger than this; for the schoolmaster in Plautus complains, that although formerly 
young men would obey their master, even after they had been elected to a public 
office, the degeneracy of the times had then reached such a pitch that a boy of 
seven years old, if reproved or censured, would break his schoolmaster’s head 
with his tablets : 
“* Nam olim populi prius honorem capiebat suffragio 
Quam magistri desinebat esse dicto obediens. 
At nunc priusquam septennis est, si attingas eum manus 
Extemplo puer pedagogo tabula dirumpit caput.”(a) 
In the middle ages, however, the wax tablets, like the specimen before us, 
were made of such a size as to admit of being carried as memorandum-books, or 
note-books, in the pocket. 
Mabillon, in his learned work, De re Diplomaticd, has quoted()) some verses 
of Baldricus, or Baudri, abbot of Bourgeuil, in Anjou, in the eleventh century, 
composed on the occasion of breaking the style, or graphium, which he had used 
for his waxed tablets for ten years. In this poem the author gives a minute account 
of the tablets ; he describes them as having been covered with green wax, for the 
assistance of the eyes, not with black, which we may therefore infer was more 
common. He commemorates one Lambert of Angers, by whom a new style 
had been made to fit the tablets, after the old one had been broken; and he 
praises the abbot of St. Martin de Sées, by whom he had been presented with a 
case (sacculum) for holding them. He immortalizes also his secretaries, or scribes 
(Girard and Hugo), who transcribed on parchment the verses which he himself 
was wont to compose on the wax. The convenient and portable size of these tablets 
(a) Bacchid., Act 11., scen. 3., v. 34-37. 
(6) Supplem.p. 51, From a manuscript in the library of Cardinal Ottoboni. 
