The library still exists, and at the present moment
gives shelf-room to 1,800 MSS. and more than 41,700 printed books.
Besides this, another, called the Town Library, founded in the sixteenth
century, and containing 500 MSS. and 60,400 printed books, gives this
upland, busy, modern manufacturing Swiss town no mean importance as a
centre of literary culture. Physically it is probably the highest town
in Europe, its street-level being very nearly 2,200 feet above that of
the sea. Its libraries and museums are rich storehouses of medi?val
treasures. The architect raves over its monastic buildings; the scholar
and pal?ographer gloat over its books and MSS. In the libraries of St.
Gall are some of the masterpieces of Irish Saxon, and Carolingian art,
and its great Benedictine abbey under Grimald from 841, _i.e._ during
the later Carolingian period, possessed one of the most active
_scriptoria_ in Europe. To begin with the beginning, however, we must
leave St. Gall, and, passing by some less important MSS., go back to the
year 781 and the city of Toulouse. In that year, and in the Abbey of St.
Sernin (Saturninus) in that city, was finished a wonderful and truly
splendid manuscript of the Gospels as a present to the Emperor and his
wife Hildegardis.
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