Executed in the fifteenth century, probably in the north of France, the small manuscript from which the twelve initial letters are taken is in a private collection. It consists of twenty-four leaves of rather stout vellum, measuring 4-3/8 inches by 3 inches, and has evidently been a sampler or pattern book for a school of illumination. It contains two alphabets. The letters in the plate are selected from one of them. Outlines of the rest of this alphabet are on the back of Plate I. In copying them for color the student will remember that those letters which contain blue flowers are red, and _vice versâ_. Each letter is painted on a ground of leaf-gold highly burnished, and is ornamented with a natural flower. We may recognize the rose, the pansy, the strawberry, the columbine, the wall-flower, the corn-flower, the sweet pea, the iris, the daisy, the thistle, and others. Pinks, dog-roses, and forget-me-nots also occur, and the little volume forms, in this respect, a curious and interesting record of the produce of the flower garden so long ago as the time of the English "Wars of the Roses." The second alphabet is of a wholly different character, the letters, not the ground on which they are placed, being gilt, and the ground colored red or blue. Over the red and the blue is a scroll pattern in white, but the red is sometimes decorated with a pattern in body-yellow, which produces an exceedingly gorgeous effect. In two or three cases the ground is green, worked over in a darker olive tint heightened with yellow. In one, a flower or scroll of grey is placed on a ground of blue dotted all over with minute gold spots. The blue used in copying these initials for the plate was Prussian, mixed with Chinese White, and shaded with pure color. The green is a mixture of Indian Yellow and Prussian Blue. The pink is Lake and White shaded with pure Lake. The red terminals which appear in some of the letters are of Vermilion, shaded with Lake. Chinese White body color is largely used in working diapers over the letters of both colors. These letters are good examples of the form chiefly in use for illuminated manuscripts and in ornamental sculpture all over northern Europe from the twelfth century to the sixteenth. They are generally called "the Lombardic character," from some real or fancied connection with Lombardy. Such names must be cautiously accepted. "Arabic numerals," for example, have been proved to be somewhat modified Greek letters. But the Lombardic capitals, whatever their origin, lend themselves readily to the exigencies of the illuminator, and are all the more effective from the contrast they present to the text.