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This gracious custom seems to have come down from the time when the owners of precious books constantly employed scribes and expert illuminators in making copies for distribution. The work done in the scriptoriums of the monasteries, we know, was sent away as presents, or in exchange for other volumes.
The author of the Reflections has HEARD a great deal concerning the modern lights; but he has not yet had the good fortune to SEE much of them. He has read more than he can justify to anything but the spirit of curiosity, of the works of these illuminators of the world.
It is a revolving light, with several great illuminators of copper silvered, and colored lamp-glasses. Looking downward, we had the island displayed as on a chart, with its little bays, its isthmus of shingly beach connecting two parts of the island, and overflowed at high tide; its sunken rocks about it, indicated by the swell, or slightly breaking surf.
Let us think of those who watched the ruin of the old world; of the bishop of Hippo dying when his city was about to fall before the onslaught of the Vandals; of the monks who, in a Europe peopled with wolves, worked as illuminators, builders, musicians.
Along with this I purchased every possible accessory draw-tubes, micrometers, a camera lucida, lever-stage, achromatic condensers, white cloud illuminators, prisms, parabolic condensers, polarizing apparatus, forceps, aquatic boxes, fishing-tubes, with a host of other articles, all of which would have been useful in the hands of an experienced microscopist, but, as I afterward discovered, were not of the slightest present value to me.
And on the deck beneath us, crumpled, twisted, face hidden so that we could not identify him, lay the man whom Wada had speared. And now I come to a phase of adventure that is new to me. I have never found it in the books. In short, it is carelessness coupled with laziness, or vice versa. I had used two of my illuminators. Only one remained.
For the most incredulous souls of our time, the Golden Legend at least still seems like one of those pure parchments, on which simple illuminators painted the faces of saints with gum water, or white of egg on golden backgrounds. Jacopo de Voragine is the Jehan Fouquet, the André Beaunevue, of literary miniature, of mystic prose!
One of his favourite sayings was "He who occupies himself with the things of Christ, must ever dwell with Christ." It is related that, in the Monastery of Maes Eyck, while the illuminators were at work in the evening, copying Holy Writ, the devil, in a fit of rage, extinguished their candles; they, however, were promptly lighted again by a Breath of the Holy Spirit, and the good work went on!
The point is: they did come aft; they were compelled to retreat by my illuminator; and it was my last illuminator. And yet I did not start in, there and then, to manufacture fresh ones. This was carelessness. It was laziness. And I hazarded our lives, perhaps, if you please, on a psychological guess that I had convinced our mutineers that we had an inexhaustible stock of illuminators in reserve.
His pallor reminded Theydon of the tint of ivory, of that waxen-white Dutch grisaille beloved of fifteenth century illuminators of manuscripts. His silence was disturbing, almost irritating, his manner singularly calm.
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