To select an example of Gothic illumination which shall exemplify the earliest features of the pointed style is not an easy matter, notwithstanding the number of thirteenth-century MSS. which still exist in public collections. In the National Library at Paris are several such MSS. One that decidedly marks the change from the German work hitherto in vogue is the Psalter of St. Louis (Nat. Lib., Paris., Lat. 10525), which contains nearly eighty small, delicately executed miniatures. It was completed about 1250. Its noticeable features are a vastly improved dexterity in draughtsmanship, which displays a refined certainty of touch, enabling the artist to express his intention with unhesitating freedom. The drawing thus produced in outline is filled in with flat tints of body-colour, without gradation or any attempt at brush-work shading. Whatever finishing in this respect might be thought necessary was added with the pen. Nothing could show more clearly that it is simply and frankly imitative of stained glass. As in the glass the black outline is left for definition. No colour is used on hands of faces except a slight touch of red on the cheeks and lips. The prevailing colours are rich blue and bright scarlet. Perhaps the illuminator would have been better advised had he neglected some of the harder features of this kind of work. Not considering that the limits of the glass painter did not apply to his vellum, he fettered himself unnecessarily, and instead of a picture he has only succeeded in producing a surface enamel, or a mere reticulation of surface-patterns. This very defect has by some writers been held up to admiration as the true perfection of all illumination. Its flatness was applauded because it had to be shut up in a book, and was therefore the only appropriate way of making a picture for such a purpose. But whoever would dream that because a picture, painted in due perspective and proper light and shade, was to be shut up in a book that the figures represented in relief would actually be crushed. Such reasoning is most puerile. The supposed parallel case of a carpet or hearth-rug representing groups of flowers--even if the latter ever did deceive the domestic cat--does not in the least affect the most childish conception of a picture in a book. We see it in a scene in light and shade, we enjoy and admire its reliefs, but at the same time we know it is a picture, and that it is quite flat. The two tests of knowledge never interfere with each other. To suppose they do is to suppose a case of imbecility that even a lunatic must laugh to scorn. So far, therefore, we think the illuminator mistaken in slavishly copying the limitations of the glass-painter. It is no very great knowledge of nature that is shown in these drawings. There is a good example of the method of study followed by thirteenth-century artists in the sketch-book of a French mason named Villars de Honnecourt, still kept in