There is a certain book in the Bodleian not quite so old which I should value more highly. With considerably more evidence than usual in such cases, it is identified as the book of mass of Queen Margaret of Scotland. I wonder if the lovely Saxon princess had it with her when she fled to Scotland after the Norman Conquest to implore the protection of Malcomb Canmore who made her his Queen? But, better still, his people afterwards made her their patron saint, realizing that she had done more to refine them than any other early ruler. Tradition tells how the King, though he could not read, loved to handle the Queen’s precious books—perhaps he gave this little volume adorned with gold and jewels to the lady of his reverent love. The thirteenth century has great attractions for a bibliophile. Never were the embellishments on books more liberal and amusing. Nowadays illuminators consider the fitness of things, but in the thirteenth century they just designed. I know of a most charming psalter of the late thirteenth century with the capitals filled with the spirited knights and the margins with all-colored dragons whose attenuated tails form circles, sometimes not more than an eighth of an inch in diameter, that separate tiny butting goats or strutting cocks, or Darwinian monkeys or other irrelevant matter from the text. Did these dragons creep in from the Norse mythologies, I wonder, or were they just creatures of adaptive anatomy for decorative purposes? The early illuminators did not turn to nature; simple people never do. This illustrator’s mind certainly wandered; whether it started with the psalms I cannot determine, but he displays two tiny gilded stops one-eighth of an inch by two inches that the seriously inclined might take as sermons. One represents a jester, with cap and bells and wand, and little other raiment, successfully charging a fully armed knight; and the other, Venus, attended by a blue dragon, pursuing a cross between a man and a devil. The fourteenth and fifteenth century illuminators and illustrators begin to think; indeed, they are among the best historians we find of that period: modern illustration is fast returning to their methods. At the commencement of the fourteenth century, miniatures of the noble owners of elaborate volumes began to be inserted in their books. Thus a consecutive history of two hundred years of French portraiture is safely folded away in the Bibliotheque Nationale, where we may watch the stiff early miniatures gradually develop into charming little _genre_ pictures. Though the consideration of atmosphere was passed over at that time, many of them are models of composition.