The wholesale destruction of MSS. and mediæval libraries, at the Suppression of the Religious Houses, though doubtless a heavy loss from an artistic point of view, considering the loss of illuminated books, may be considered as compensated by the increased activity of the press and the reconstruction of the library. What was actually lost to literature? John Bale tells us, Manuscripts of the Fathers, Schoolmen, and Commentators. Was this a loss? It is quite certain that the monkish commentators regarded their text from a point of view no longer held: the Holy Scriptures, they said, were lost. The manuscript copies were very likely lost, but the press multiplied copies. I think that the greatest loss to literature was the loss of certain chronicles, of which we have so many left, which relate the history of current events as the monkish scribe heard and understood them. In any case, the destruction of so many books made it impossible, henceforward, to consider a library as made up chiefly of manuscripts; the press rapidly restored the books that were wanted; and gave the world a library filled with printed books, while the old commentators were clean forgotten.
The age of great folios and mighty scholars was the seventeenth, rather than the sixteenth, century. In the sixteenth, scholars were busy in putting forth new editions of the classics. Men like Dolet and Rabelais were not ashamed to correct for the press. The voluminous commentator came afterwards. Meantime, it is remarkable that we had no Rabelais among our writers. He, formerly a friar, came out of the cloister, his head filled with the old learning and eager for the new. His great book became at once popular, and was eagerly passed from hand to hand. The origins of his chapters have quite recently been explored and discovered in Mr. W. F. Smith’s excellent translation. They are shown to be chiefly extracts from gloss and commentary, burlesqued, imitated, and held up to the ridicule and scorn of scholars. The common people understood only the bubbling mirth and laughter, coupled with the spontaneous unseemliness of the page; the scholar understood the allegory and the purpose of the writer; the ecclesiastic alone, and one of the older type, understood the true nature of the overwhelming contempt and hatred of the order that was passing away—contempt and hatred thinly veiled and concealed except for those who knew the gloss and commentary of the past. We have no Rabelais; among all our friars there was no scholar; among our ejected monks, if there were scholars, they stuck by their order; among all the priests, monks, and friars, who joined in the Reformation, there was not one who so despised the old faith as to make it the theme of such a book as that of Rabelais. Hatred there was in plenty, after the fires of Smithfield: hatred which continued to flourish in our literature and still lingers; but not the full bitterness of hatred, fear, contempt, and restlessness which fill the pages of Rabelais, Étienne Dolet, and Bonaventure des Periers.