Another MS. deserving of study is a richly illuminated Bible now in the Burney Collection of our National Library (No. 3). Another, which, owing to its being recommended for study by the late John Ruskin, was once known as the Ruskin Book, is Add. MS. 17341, which contains many fine initials with border and bracket foliages similar to those of the Evangeliary of the Sainte Chapelle, now in the National Library, Paris (MS. Lat. 17326). Both the MSS. show the contemporary peculiarity of presenting Bible characters, excepting divine personages, apostles, and evangelists in ordinary local costume. Paris, of course, is the city where most, and perhaps the best, of these MSS. are preserved; but those named above, in London, are also among the finest known examples. CHAPTER II RISE OF NATIONAL STYLES The fourteenth century the true Golden Age of Gothic illumination--France the cradle of other national styles--Netherlandish, Italian, German, etc.--Distinction of schools--Difficulty of assigning the _provenance_ of MSS.--The reason for it--MS. in Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge--The Padua Missal--Artists' names--Whence obtained. Through the thirteenth century is the epoch of the Gothic renaissance, it is the fourteenth to which really belongs the title of the Golden Age. The style of work remains precisely the same, only it grows. It changes from the bud to the leaf. It casts off the severity and much of the restraint of its earlier character. To the grace of youth it adds beauty, the beauty of adolescence. To fourteenth-century illumination we can give no higher praise than that it is beautiful. Not, indeed, because of its deliberate limitations, but in spite of them. For after ages have taught us that if in pure ornament and resplendent decorative completeness the pages of the fourteenth century cannot be surpassed, in miniature historiation it must take a second place. The skilled illuminators of the later schools are the masters of the mere picture. For surely no judge of art could possibly assert that the miniatures of the Grunani Breviary or of the Brera Graduals as miniatures are inferior to those of the Psalter of St. Louis, the Berry Bible, or the Prayer-book of Margaret of Bavaria. Yet these are typical MSS. of the highest rank. Hence we say that while the illumination of the Golden Age of the art was beautiful, it was not absolutely perfect. It is not to be taken by modern students as the only possible model or basis simply because it was the best of its kind. There is no such despotism in art. To those who think it the only possible form of book decoration, let it be so by all means, but we may as well hope to clothe our soldiers in chain or plate armour, and send the elite of our nobility on another crusade to Jerusalem, or satisfy our universities with the _quod libets_ and _quiddities_ of the _trivium_ and _quadrivium_, as hope to make popular to the England of the twentieth century the artistic tastes of the fourteenth.