Page:Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods.djvu/24

 by a strange irony, it came to pass that their libraries excelled those of most other Orders, as Richard de Bury testifies in the Philobiblon.

Whenever we turned aside to the cities and places where the Mendicants had their convents&hellip;we found heaped up amidst the utmost poverty the utmost riches of wisdom.&hellip;

These men are as ants ever preparing their meat in the summer, and ingenious bees continually fabricating cells of honey&hellip; And to pay due regard to truth, although they lately at the eleventh hour have entered the Lord's vineyard..., they have added more in this brief hour to the stock of the sacred books than all the other vine-dressers; following in the footsteps of Paul, the last to be called but the first in preaching, who spread the gospel of Christ more widely than all others. It might have been expected, from the use of the word library in the Rule of S. Benedict, that a special room assigned to books would have been one of the primitive component parts of every Benedictine House. This, however, is not the case. Such a room does usually occur in these Houses, but it will be found, on examination, that it was added to some previously existing structure in the fourteenth or fifteenth