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I now think that a chronological survey will be more practicable, and that it will be best to take first the subject of book-production, looking at each country in turn in a single period, instead of following the course taken by each, from the sixth century to the fifteenth. Sixth and Seventh Centuries. Italy, France, and Spain are the main centres.
There, then, is a second survey of our ground, somewhat more detailed than the first, but woefully sketchy. Everyone who has studied MSS. of any class or period would detect omissions in it which for him would vitiate the whole story. The best I can hope is that the assertions in it are not incorrect, and that it gives a true notion of the general course of book-production in medieval times.
France, tortured by wars, put forth little in the middle years, but then came Charles V., a King who was really interested in books, and the library he formed at the Louvre gave a stimulus to book-production which spread wide and lasted long.
These special proofs show all the charm of wood engraving. In the case of the initial large C, reproduced on page 91, Mr. Bradbury's specimen shows the beautiful quality which in our own time Mr. Sturge Moore and Mr. Pissarro are at such pains to secure in engravings made for love of the art. One only wishes that the exigencies of book-production would allow us to attempt rivalry with Mr.
True, one or two of surpassing interest have been found in such libraries; a famous Plato was brought by Dr. E. D. Clarke from Patmos, and is at Oxford now; the treatise of Hippolytus against heresies came in the forties from a monastery to the Paris library. But these are exceptions. We have to look at Constantinople as by far the most important centre of learning and of book-production.
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