DISCOVERY OF MSS. 25 



poet's copy of this and several others of Cicero's works,* for 

 Petrarch transcribed many manuscripts, and we have before 

 alluded to the beauty of his handwriting; but among the 

 emperors, Theodosius the younger was so celebrated for the 

 elegance with which he transcribed religious works as to 

 acquire the epithet of Calligraphes, or fair writer, f Many 

 manuscripts have been recovered in the most singular man- 

 ner. Part of Livy, for instance, was found by a man of 

 letters on his battledore, and Sir Robert Cotton discovered 

 his tailor on the point of cutting up for measures the original 

 Magna Charta ; but we have reason to believe that many 

 valuable works of the ancients have been lost from the monks 

 having erased the writings, in order to inscribe their own 

 legends on the parchment, the value of the material being at 

 that time so great as to compensate them for the labor. The 

 celebrated Maio has discovered, by the assistance of che- 

 mistry, a liquid with which he washes the parchment, which 

 restores the original characters, and thus many valuable frag- 

 ments of the ancient classical writers have been restored, 

 interlined with monkish legends. 



HENRIETTA. 



Did you ever see any, aunt? 



Yes, I saw one in the Ambrosian library at Milan, where 

 there are several. The Orations of Cicero, over which had 

 been transcribed the poems of a priest of the 6th century; 

 other portions of the same author, under a Latin translation 

 of the acts of the Council of Chalcedon; the letters of Marcus 

 Aurelius, under another history of the same council ; and the 

 Institutes of Gaius,^: which were not only covered with a 

 treatise of St. Jerome, but had also a third writing between 

 them, which likewise consisted of epistles and meditations 



* Valery, Voyages en Italie, iii. 41. 

 f Gibbon, chap, xxxii. 



\ A celebrated Roman writer upon Jurisprudence. 

 3 



