The smells of dust, mildew, and the faint metallic tang of the mediaeval pigments wove together with the weight and texture of the book to give me a sense of vertigo, as if I stood on a precipice above a chasm into history. Perhaps it was the feeling of it, the centennial strength of it, to resist those long ages while every reader went down into dust, as its writer had gone down, proud, wise and weak, Augustine, praising, wishing for his City of God. But where lay that strength, in the vellum and inks, or in the very words? Some monk or scribe had copied a copy of a copy, to make even this, the first folio edition, given them new form, new skin, if not flesh, and if words and a book may live again, may not a man, or better than a man?