The method of the illuminators and miniaturists seems always to have been to draw their figures and ornaments clearly out first with a pen before colouring. [Illustration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY. BIBLE, HEINRICH QUENTEL. (COLOGNE, 1480.)] In the full-coloured miniatures the pen lines are not visible, but in this MS. they are preserved with the delicate tinted treatment. The designs I speak of are placed two on a page, occupying it entirely. They are inclosed in vermilion borders, terminated at each corner with a leaf. There is a very distinct and graceful feeling about the designs. The same hand appears to have added on the lower margins of the succeeding text pages a series of quaint figures--combats of grotesque animals, hunting, hawking, and fishing scenes, and games and sports, and, finally, Biblical subjects. Here, again, I think we may detect in the early illustrators a tendency to escape from the limitations of the book page, though only a tendency. A fine ornamental page combining illumination with miniature is given in the "Epistle of Philippe de Comines to Richard II." at the end of the fourteenth century. The figures, interesting historically and as examples of costume, are relieved upon a diapered ground. The text is in double columns, with square initials, and the page is lightened by open foliation branching out upon the margin from the straight spiney border strips, which on the inner side terminate in a dragon. [Sidenote: THE BEDFORD BOOK OF HOURS.] As a specimen of early fifteenth century work, both for illuminator, scribe, and miniaturist, it would be difficult to find a more exquisite book than the Bedford Hours (Brit. Mus. MS. Add. 18850), dated 1422, said to be the work of French artists, though produced in England. The kalendar, which occupies the earlier pages, is remarkable for its small and very brilliant and purely coloured miniatures set like gems in a very fine, delicate, light, open, leafy border, bright with burnished gold trefoil leaves, which are characteristic of French illuminated books of this period (_see_ Nos. 5 and 6, Appendix).