The fourteenth century, the great mother of change, was as busy in making ornamental books as in other artistic work. When we are once fairly in the century a great change is apparent again in the style. It is not quite true to say that it is more redundant than its predecessor, but it has more mechanical redundancy. The backgrounds to the pictures are more elaborated; sometimes diapered blue and red, sometimes gold most beautifully chased with dots and lines. The borders cover the page more; buds turn into open leaves; often abundance of birds and animals appear in the borders, naturalistically treated (and very well drawn); there is more freedom, and yet less individuality in this work; in short the style, though it has lost nothing (in its best works) of elegance and daintiness--qualities so desirable in an ornamental book--has lost somewhat of manliness and precision; and this goes on increasing till, towards the end of the century, we feel that we have before us work that is in peril of an essential change for the worse. [In France "Bibles Historiaux," i.e., partial translations of the Bible, very copiously pictured, were one of the most noteworthy productions of the latter half of the century. The Bible taken in the tent of the French King at the battle of Poitiers, now in the British Museum, is a fine example.] The differentiation, too, betwixt the countries increases; before the century is quite over, England falls back in the race [though we have in the British Museum some magnificent examples of English illumination of the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries, e.g., "The Salisbury Book;" a huge Bible (Harl. i., e. ix.) ornamented in a style very peculiarly English. The Wyclifite translation of the Bible at the Museum is a good specimen of this style], and French-Flanders and Burgundy come forward, while Italy has her face turned toward Renaissance, and Germany too often shows a tendency toward coarseness and incompleteness, which had to be redeemed in the long last by the honesty of invention and fitness of purpose of her woodcut ornaments to books. Many most beautiful books, however, were turned out, not only throughout the fourteenth, but even in the first half of the fifteenth century. ["The Hours of the Duke of Berry" (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), and the "Bedford Hours," in the British Museum, both French, are exceedingly splendid examples of this period.]