Plate 14 is an example of French grisaille in its earlier stage. The four designs look like fine chalk drawings prepared for the use of an engraver, rather than like finished illustrations in a book. There is an ease and freedom in the figure-drawing which reveal the hand of a true artist, and the treatment of the draperies is excellent; but the landscape accessories in the lower two divisions are primitive in their absurdity and childish execution. The writing in this example, and in plate 13 also, is typical fourteenth century gothic; small, cramped, square, and angular. The border is of the early ivy-leaf pattern, stiff and not natural, but not inelegant as decoration. The style and character of {90}the two plates are essentially French, and could not be found in examples of illumination at the period anywhere outside of France. Plate 15 introduces us to a totally different kind and style of ornament. There is no appearance of stiffness here in the border, with its bold conventional foliage of light blue and green, and the long feathery lines that sweep out from it in free and graceful curves. The miniature too is full of merit both in design and execution, its only drawback being the rather ugly pattern of the green flooring. The seated priest is in the full costume of a doctor or literatus of Chaucer's time; and the expression in his features, as well as in those of the kneeling Gower, is excellently rendered. The writing here is not the square angular gothic of the two preceding plates, but a more rounded script, partaking of the nature of the charter hand, which was appropriated to the English language. The a is the only letter in it quite identical with that of the fourteenth century gothic, and the p (for _th_) shows the survival of Anglo-Saxon writing, just as the w shows us a modern English letter at a tolerably early stage of its growth. The k is likewise noteworthy, as being the peculiar form of the letter which had been evolved in the rapid writing of court-scribes, and which is still used in German manuscript. Plate 16 shows us Franco-Flemish art in a phase in which the simple mastery of design had become subordinate to the brilliancy and magnificence of decoration. The inner border of interwoven blue and red lines upon a ground of gold is connected with, and grows out of, the illuminated initial in a suitably appropriate fashion, but the outer border of conventional foliage, red, blue, green, and yellow, with its inserted figures of a kneeling man and a hybrid dromedary, has no comprehensible affinity to the rest of the work, and is tacked on without any reason beyond the desire for splendour and variety. The style is not distinctively Flemish, although the painting was done at {91}Tournay. It is rather a development out of Franco-Burgundian models, and more suggestive of French origin than any other; in fact, the extension of central French influence northwards through Burgundy.