SPECTACLES. 509 



invention. I do not pretend to negative the assumption that 

 they can be assigned to so early a date. But I cannot but think 

 that I must have certainly discovered them in my accounts had 

 they been in existence earlier, and that they would have strayed 

 out of the philosopher's study or the alchemist's laboratory into the 

 hands of students. I am well aware that it was very dangerous to 

 be over-stocked with appliances for economising and improving 

 natural gifts in the middle ages, and that many persons who 

 might have aided mankind nobly in earlier times were deterred 

 by the peril they ran of being convicted as wizards. Ortho- 

 doxy, so called, seated in high places and clad in purple and 

 fine linen, dreaded criticism, and thought, with some justice, 

 that all knowledge was criticism, as it is apt to do still. But I 

 can hardly imagine that the inventor of spectacles could have 

 been in peril of fire and faggot. 



The invention of printing could have been of little avail, 

 unless it had been followed by the discovery of the means for 

 giving artificial clearness of vision. Our ancestors were very 

 shortlived. They were old at fifty. But many must have 

 been dimsighted in early years. When spectacles were in- 

 vented, it became possible to print in small type, and so to 

 cheapen books. The manual superseded the folio. Elzevir 

 improved on Aldus, and the aged could read. I know nothing 

 which illustrates the new luxury of the elderly man better than 

 the fact that Selden bought spectacles, as it appears, by the 

 gross, and used them as bookmarkers. When, after his death, 

 his library came to Oxford, the University which in a fit 

 of strange self-forgetful ness, sent once in its career its most 

 eminent son to Parliament, pairs of spectacles were found 

 numerously in the volumes. So in their poor way, the old nuns 

 of Sion, when the cellaress bought these spectacles only a 

 very few of this official's accounts have been preserved in 

 1492, must have been delighted with the renewal of that world 

 of sight of which age had hitherto been reft. 



BOOKS. My accounts contain but few entries of books, 

 Wealthy men gave them, sometimes fellows and monks copied 



