The famous _Benedictional_ written for Æthelwold, Bishop of Winchester, some fifty years after Alfred’s time, may be taken to show us to what perfection this art was brought. The style is that to which the artists of his time were tending. Here and there, among older books, we may trace features which occur in this sumptuous volume, both among the figure-subjects and among the ornaments. Sir Digby Wyatt, an excellent judge, is enthusiastic on the manuscript, yet fails to appreciate the figure-subjects, because they show “little classical influence.” I am not inclined to find fault on that account. The opinion of a learned antiquary of the last generation, John Gage, should have great weight. He looked upon the _Benedictional_ as the culmination of the art of the Anglo-Saxon school; and John Young Ottley expressed himself in equally eulogistic terms about the manuscript, which is in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire and which was fully described and in great part engraved by the Society of Antiquaries in 1832 (_Archæologia_, vol. xxiv.) Ottley points out its chief claim on our admiration thus: “You desire from me a few words on the illuminations in St. Æthelwold’s Benedictionary, with my opinion of their merits as works of art. I feel honoured by the request, and comply with it the more willingly as I can honestly say that I think them in the highest degree creditable to the taste and intelligence of this nation at a period when in most parts of Europe the fine arts are commonly believed to have been at a very low ebb.” Farther on, Ottley speaks of “the justness of the general proportions of the figures.” He especially praises some little angels holding scrolls, which, he says, “have so much gracefulness and animation, are so beautifully draped, and so well adapted in their attitudes to the spaces they occupy, that I hardly know how to praise them sufficiently.” The mechanical part of the work should be carefully examined. It shows—and not it alone, but many early books as well—that in the time of Alfred artists could command the help of artificers who knew how to make vellum fit for the most delicate painting and writing; that colours were produced worthy of the vellum for which they were prepared; that gold-beating and gilding with the leaf had been carried to a perfection never since surpassed. Godeman, the monk, afterwards, in 970, abbot of Thorney, who wrote the book, must have been born during the reign of Alfred, or soon after, and learned his art from the writers of the great king who, in his English translation of the Pastoral of Gregory, remarks feelingly on the destruction wrought by the Danes, and how before their incursions “the churches throughout Britain were filled with treasures and books.” FOOTNOTES