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It is probable that Duke Břetislav II, grandson of the first prince of that name, encouraged the expression of his people's religious and national sentiments, in those illuminated manuscripts of the Bible, of Missals, and the "Cantionales," those works so beautiful in design, so loyal and sincere of execution, their colours as fresh as when the artist's hand withdrew reluctantly from the finishing touch.

Truth to say, he must always have youth, the illusion of beauty, vanity in womanhood, the novelty of a new, untested temperament, quite as he must have pictures, old porcelain, music, a mansion, illuminated missals, power, the applause of the great, unthinking world.

In the immense bay window was a large Louis Quatorze table, round which the ladies all placed themselves at their embroidery, though I preferred looking over curious illuminated missals, etc., etc.

Italian art existed in these small beginnings, in the gorgeous but quaintly formal or fantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the stiff spasmodic efforts of here and there an artist spirit such as the old Florentine Cimabue's, when a great man heralded a great epoch. But first I should like to mention the means by which art then worked.

The shrines and gospels, the reliquaries and missals, the crosses and bells that are still existent, many in Ireland, others in every country in the world, attest beyond any dispute that Irish art-workers held a preëminent place in the early middle ages, and that works of Irish art are still treasured as unique in their day and time.

Notwithstanding this evidence of priority, the French dispute the invention; and the learned CAMUS, in his "Historical Sketch of Polytypage and Stereotypage," affirms, on the authority of LOTTIN, that, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the stereotypic process was put in practice in France, for printing the calendars prefixed to the missals. Paris, March 26, 1802.

Here were Luther's manuscript translation of the Bible, Gutenberg's Bible, the first book printed on movable types, the ancient Codex of the time of Charlemagne, miniatures, illuminated missals, and other things of much interest. As my dinner-hour approached I begged off for that day from the cordially offered inspection of the celebrated Hamilton manuscripts.

No rhetoric could impress on a class the real spirit and strength of the middle ages as could one of my illuminated psalters or missals; no declamation upon the boldness of Luther could impress thinking young men as did citations from his ``Erfurt Sermon, which, by weakening his safe-conduct, put him virtually at the mercy of his enemies at the Diet of Worms; no statements as to the fatuity of Robespierre could equal citations from an original copy of his ``Report on the Moral and Religious Considerations which Ought to Govern the Republic''; all specifications of the folly of Marat paled before the ravings in the original copies of his newspaper, ``L'Ami du Peuple''; no statistics regarding the paper-money craze in France could so impress its actuality on students as did the seeing and handling of French revolutionary assignats and mandats, many of them with registration numbers clearly showing the enormous quantities of this currency then issued; no illustration, at second hand, of the methods of the French generals during the Revolutionary period could produce the impression given by a simple exhibition of the broadsides issued by the proconsuls of that period; no description of the collapse of the triumvirate and the Reign of Terror could equal a half-hour's reading from the ``Moniteur''; and all accounts of the Empire were dim compared to grandiose statements read from the original bulletins of Napoleon.

See the Sarum and other missals, ap. The Emperor Frederic III, and afterwards Ladislaus son of the king of Poland, and Cosimo III grand-duke of Tuscany went up dressed as Canons of St.

For the designs of furniture of the tenth to the fourteenth centuries we are in a great measure dependent upon old illuminations and missals of these remote times.