And yet in less than a day, by the monstrous and
abominable cruelty of the soldiers of Caesar, when the latter followed
Pompey to Alexandria, it was burned and reduced to ashes. Zonarius,
the ecclesiastical historian, writes that the same happened at
Constantinople in the time of Zeno, when a superb and magnificent
palace, adorned with all sorts of manuscript books, was burnt, to the
eternal regret and insupportable detriment of all those who made a
profession of letters. And without amusing ourselves too curiously
in recounting the destruction among the ancients, we have in our time
experienced a similar loss--of which the memory is so recent that the
wounds thereof still bleed in all parts of Europe--namely, when the
Turks besieged Buda, the capital of Hungary, where the most celebrated
library of the good King Matthias was pillaged, dispersed, and
destroyed; a library which, without sparing any expense, he had enriched
with all the rarest and most excellent books, Greek, Latin, Hebrew,
and Arabic, that he had been able to collect in all the most famous
provinces of the earth.
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