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Updated: April 30, 2025
My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him, and tortured him with questions, but it was labour in vain: like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative but an honourable occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of ethics, and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy, sooner than admit to us that, within a mile of Balbec, his own sister was living in her own house; sooner than find himself obliged to offer us a letter of introduction, the prospect of which would never have inspired him with such terror had he been absolutely certain as, from his knowledge of my grandmother's character, he really ought to have been certain that in no circumstances whatsoever would we have dreamed of making use of it.
The ink placed upon such erasures has a peculiar bluish tinge. When the latter method was used, the writing as in palimpsests can be made to reappear by warming. The parchment can be either laid on a hot plate or pressed with a hot flatiron between two sheets of paper.
There is the Rosetta Stone, which is the gateway of history; there the Elgin Marbles, which proclaim the glory of the Greece that was; there the palimpsests which recall an age when men had time to think; and there the books of all time by means of which we can rethink the big thoughts of men long since gone from sight.
Johnson the task of compiling the catalogue. 'The Earl had the rarest books of all countries, languages, and sciences': thousands of fragments, some a thousand years old: vellum books, of which some had been scraped and used again as 'palimpsests': 'a great collection of Bibles, and editions of all the first printed books, classics, and others of our own country, ecclesiastical as well as civil, by Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, Berthelet, Rastall, Grafton, and the greatest number of pamphlets and English heads of any other person: abundance of ledgers, chartularies, etc., and original letters of eminent persons as many as would fill two hundred volumes; all the collections of his librarian Humphrey Wanley, of Stow, Sir Symonds D'Ewes, Prynne, Bishop Stillingfleet, John Bagford, Le Neve, and the flower of a hundred other libraries.
One specialty, and that not a pleasant one, of a life so protracted as mine has been in the midst of such a society as that of Florence in those days, is the enormous quantity of the names which turn the tablets of memory into palimpsests, not twice, but fifty times written over! unpleasant, not from the thronging in of the motley company, but from the inevitable passing out of them from the field of vision.
The mercurial young gentlemen who addict themselves to that exciting department of letters are open to censure as being too fitful, too prone to flit, bee-like, from flower to flower, now lighting momentarily upon an indecipherable tombstone, now perching upon a rusty morion, here dipping into crumbling palimpsests, there turning up a tattered reputation from heaps of musty biography, or discovering that the brightest names have had sad blots and blemishes scoured off by the attrition of Time's ceaseless current.
Large fragments of Cicero's Republic, of lost orations of Cicero, of the works of the rhetorician Fronto, were issued at short intervals: and all the most important of these were recovered from palimpsests in the Ambrosian or the Vatican Library. They had all come, too, from one place, the same Bobbio which has been already named. Bobbio was founded by the Irishman St.
In addition to these, much that has come to us has been extracted, as it were unwillingly, from palimpsests, and is, from that and from other causes, fragmentary. We have indeed only fragments of the essays De Republica. De Legibus, De Natura Deorum, De Divinatione, and De Fato, in addition to the Academica.
Features of this latter sort "dislimn" and yield, as the writing on palimpsests, to the regal majesty of the divine countenance, which none can look upon and smile. Let me paint De Quincey's face as at this moment I seem to see it. It is wrinkled as with an Homeric antiquity; arid it is, and sallow, as parchment.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century Ferrara was one of the lights of Europe: now I know not that there is a single scholar in its university; and its library of eighty thousand volumes and nine hundred manuscripts, among which are the Greek palimpsests of Gregory Nazianzen and Chrysostom, and the manuscripts of Ariosto and Tasso, is becoming, equally with Ariosto's dust, which reposes in its halls, the prey of the worm.
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