Page:Essays in librarianship and bibliography.djvu/194

 LIBRARIANSHIP IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

natural reaction against over-statements respecting the darkness of the dark ages, has led to the counter-statement that they were not dark at all. We librarians know better. We know that they must have been in darkness, inasmuch as our body did not exist to enlighten them. There can have been no librarians where there were no libraries; and the lists of collections of manuscripts preserved to our times sufficiently prove that no set of men professionally interested in the custody of stores so diminutive can have been required. The function of librarian must have been one of the numerous offices discharged cumulatively by a single monk, upon whom it may sometimes have been imposed by way of penance. It was otherwise in classical antiquity. To say nothing of the Alexandrian Library, and its connection with men as distinguished as Callimachus and Apollonius, so late as near the close of the third century of our era the decree of the Emperor Tacitus, that the historical works of his illustrious namesake should 174