LISARDO. "I have a great respect for the literary attainments of St. Jerom; and although in the absence of the old Italic version of the Greek Bible, I am willing to subscribe to the excellence of his own, or what is now called the _Vulgate_, yet in matters of taste, connected with the harmony of colour, you must excuse me if I choose to enter my protest against that venerable father's decision." PHILEMON. "You appear to mistake the matter St. Jerom imagined that this appetite for purple MSS. was rather artificial and voluptuous; requiring regulation and correction--and that, in the end, men would prefer the former colour to the intrinsic worth of their vellum treasures." * * * * * We must not omit the note appended to this colloquy. "The general idea seems to be that PURPLE VELLUM MSS. were intended only for 'choice blades,' let us rather say, tasteful bibliomaniacs--in book collecting. St. Jerom, as Philemon above observes, is very biting in his sarcasm upon these 'purple leaves covered with letters of gold and silver.'--'For myself and my friends (adds that father), let us have lower priced books, and distinguished not so much for beauty as for accuracy.' "Mabillon remarks that these purple treasures were for the 'princes' and 'noblemen' of the times. "And we learn from the twelfth volume of the Specileginum of Theonas, that it is rather somewhat unseemly 'to write upon purple vellum in letters of gold and silver, unless at the particular desire of a prince.'" "The _subject_ also of MSS. frequently regulated the mode of executing it. Thus we learn from the 28th Epistle of Boniface (Bishop and Martyr) to the abbess Eadburga, that this latter is entreated 'to write the Epistles of St. Peter, the master and Apostle of Boniface, in letters of gold, for the greater reverence to be paid towards the Sacred Scriptures, when the Abbess preaches before her carnally-minded auditors.'" About the close of the seventh century the Archbishop of York procured for his church a copy of the Gospels thus adorned; and that this magnificent calligraphy was then new in England may be inferred from a remark made on it that "inauditam ante seculis nostris quoddam miraculam." This art, however, shortly after declined everywhere; and in England the art of writing in gold letters, even without the rich addition of the purple-tinted material, seems to have been but imperfectly understood. The only remarkable instance of it is said to be the charter of King Edgar, in the new Minster at Winchester, in 966. In the fourteenth century it seems to have been more customary than in those immediately preceding it.