Many schools of writing throughout England were destroyed in the Danish wars, and the princes of the Norman race did little to encourage literary art. Though one or two interesting MSS. of this period survive, it is not until the accession of the Angevins that English writing makes another distinct advance. By the beginning of the thirteenth century the art had risen to the highest pitch it has ever reached. The scriptorium of St. Albans was the most celebrated. The works of Matthew Paris written there are still extant, and testify, by the character of the pictures and colored letters, to a purity of style and to the existence of a living and growing art which has never been surpassed in this country. It is believed that the numerous little Bibles of this period were chiefly written at Canterbury, and certainly, as examples of what could be done before printing, are most marvellous. One of these MSS. is before me as I write. The written part of the page measures 2-5/8 inches in width and 3-3/4 inches in height, and the book is scarcely more than an inch thick, yet it contains, on pages of fine vellum in a minute almost microscopic hand, the whole Bible and Apocrypha. The beginning of each book has a miniature representing a Scripture scene, and a larger miniature, representing the genealogy of the Saviour, is at the beginning of Genesis. Although this is the smallest complete Bible I have met with, others very little larger are in the British Museum, and with them one, of folio size, exquisitely ornamented in the same style, which bears the name of the artist, "Wills. Devoniensis," William of Devonshire. Besides Chronicles and Bibles the thirteenth century produced Psalters, the form and character of which were eventually enlarged and grew into the well-known "Horæ," or books of devotional "Hours," which were illuminated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.