Page:How to See the Vatican, Sladen, 1914.djvu/43

 HOW TO SEE THE VATICAN learning—the innumerable Archives—the priceless manuscripts, the half-million of printed books gathered in his own halls of study, mingle their currents for every scholar, of whatever country or creed, who thirsted for the river of learning, strewn with golden sands for discoverers.

The new halls in which Pope Leo stored the printed books are, in architecture, as they are in virtue, the foundations of the noble Sala Sistina, which is the outward and visible glory of the Vatican Library.

This vast hall, over two hundred feet in length, frescoed with gay arabesques perpetuating the designs which Raffaelle and Giovanni da Udine copied from Nero's Golden House, when it was first rescued from the earth of jealous centuries, is at once the most brilliant and the most dignified, though not the best in art, of the imperial Chambers of Rome. In it, cased in glass, are the most famous manuscripts in the world. It is still the most princely of libraries as it was in the days before the Spanish Armada, when the superb Sixtus founded it. But when you are in it you have no heed for him; your thoughts go back another four generations to the fairy changeling who was turned from a humble scholar—from a poor priest who tolled bells—into the most brilliant monarch who ever sat on the throne of Rh