Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. II.djvu/211

187 CLASSICAL LEARNING. — SCIENCE. 187 tered other languages. The result justified his pre- chapter diction; for "in less than a year," observes another '■ — contemporary, " her admirable genius enabled her to obtain a good knowledge of the Latin language, so that she could understand without much diffi- culty whatever was written or spoken in it." ^ Isabella inherited the taste of her father, John Herconec- ' tion ot the Second, for the collecting of books. She en- ^°°^^- dowed the convent of San Juan de los Reyes at Toledo, at the time of its foundation, 1477, with a library consisting principally of manuscripts.^ The archives of Simancas contain catalogues of part of two separate collections, belonging to her, whose broken remains have contributed to swell the mag- 3 Carro de las Donas, lib. 2, cap. 62 et seq., apud Mem. de la Acad, de Hist., torn. vi. Ilust. 21. — Pulgar, Letras, (Amstelodami, 1670,) let. 11. — L. Marineo, Co- sas Memorables, fol. 182. — It is sufficient evidence of her familiari- ty with the Latin, that the letters addressed to her by her confessor seem to have been written in that language and the Castilian indif- ferently, exhibiting occasionally a curious patchwork in the alternate use of each in the same epis- tle. See Correspondencia Episto- lar, apud Mem. de la Acad, de Hist., torn. vi. Ilust. 13. printing, collections of books were necessarily very small and thinly scattered, owing to the extreme cost of manuscripts. The learned Saez has collected some curious particulars relative to this matter. The most copious library which he could find any account of, in the middle of the fifteenth century, was owned by the counts of Bena- vente, and contained not more than one hundred and twenty volumes. Many of these were duplicates ; of Livy alone there were eight copies. The cathedral churches in Spain rented their books every year by auction to the highest bid- ders, whence they derived a con- siderable revenue. It would appear from a copy of Gratian's Canons, preserved in the Celestine monastery in Paris, that the copyist was engaged twenty- one months in transcribing that manuscript. At this rate, the pro- duction of four thousand copies by one hand would require nearly eight thousand years, a work now easily performed in less than four months. Such was the tardineso in multiplying copies before the m- vention of printing. Two thou- sand volumes may be procured now at a price, which in those days would hardly have sufficed to pur- chase fifty. See Tratado de Mo- nedas de Enrique III., apud Mora- tin, Obras, ed. de la Acad., (Ma- drid, 1830,) tom. i. pp. 91, 92. Mo- ratin argues from extreme cases.
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