The story of man is fossilized for us, as it were, or rather preserved, with all its semblance of life and colour, in art and books. The procession of history reaching far back into the obscurity of the forgotten or inarticulate past, is reflected, with all its movement, gold and colour, in the limpid stream of design, that mirror-like, paints each passing phase for us, and illustrates each act in the drama. In the language of line and of letters, of symbol and picture, each age writes its own story and character, as page after page is turned in the book of time. Here and there the continuity of the chapters is broken, a page is missing, a passage is obscure; there are breaks and fragments--heroic torsos and limbs instead of whole figures. But more and more, by patient research, labour, and comparison, the voids are being filled up, until some day perhaps there will be no chasm of conjecture in which to plunge, but the volume of art and human history will be as clear as pen and pencil can make it, and only left for a present to continue, and a future to carry to a completion which is yet never complete. [Sidenote: ILLUMINATED MSS.] If painting is the looking-glass of nations and periods, pictured-books may be called the hand-glass which still more intimately reflects the life of different centuries and peoples, in all their minute and homely detail and quaint domesticity, as well as their playful fancies, their dreams, and aspirations. While the temples and the tombs of ancient times tell us of the pomp and splendour and ambition of kings, and the stories of their conquests and tyrannies, the illuminated MSS. of the Middle Ages show us, as well as these, the more intimate life of the people, their sports and their jests, their whim and fancy, their work and their play, no less than the mystic and religious and ceremonial side of that life, which was, indeed, an inseparable part of it; the whole worked in as with a kind of embroidery of the pen and brush, with the most exquisite sense of decorative beauty. [Illustration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY. LEIDEN CHRISTI. (BAMBERG, ALBRECHT PFISTER, 1470.)] Mr. Herbert Spencer, in the course of his enunciation of the philosophy of evolution, speaks of the book and the newspaper lying on the table of the modern citizen as connected through a long descent with the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the ancient Egyptians, and the picture-writing of still earlier times. We might go (who knows how much further?) back into prehistoric obscurity to find the first illustrator, pure and simple, in the hunter of the cave, who recorded the incidents of his sporting life on the bones of his victims.