est
books of almost any foreign country. It is small wonder, therefore, that
our bookmen, when they have been minded to write on their hobbies, have
sought beauty and stateliness of work where they could most readily find
them, and that the labourers in the book-field of our own country are
not numerous. Touchstone's remark, 'a poor thing, but mine own,' might,
on the worst view of the case, have suggested greater diligence at home;
but on a wider view English book-work is by no means a 'poor thing.' Its
excellence at certain periods is as striking as its inferiority at
others, and it is a literal fact that there is no art or craft connected
with books in which England, at one time or another, has not held the
primacy in Europe.

It would certainly be unreasonable to complain that printing with
movable types was not invented at a time better suited to our national
convenience. Yet the fact that the invention was made just in the middle
of the fifteenth century constituted a handicap by which the printing
trade in this country was for generations overweighted. At almost any
earlier period, more particularly from the beginning of the fourteenth
century to the first quarter of the fifteenth, England would have been
as well equipped as any foreign country to take its part in the race.
From the production of Queen Mary's Psalter at the earlier date to that
of the Sherborne Missal at the later, English manuscripts, if we may
judge from the scanty specimens which the evil days of Henry VIII. and
Edward VI. have left us, may vie in beauty of writing and decoration
with the finest examples of Continental art. If John Siferwas, instead
of William Caxton, had introduced printing into England, our English
incunabula would have taken a far higher place. But the sixty odd years
which separate the two men were absolutely disastrous to the English
book-trade. After her exhausting and futile struggle with France, England
was torn asunder by the wars of the Roses, and by the time these were
ended the school of illumination, so full of promise, and seemingly so
firmly established, had absolutely died out. When printing was introduced
England possessed no trained illuminators or skilful scribes such as in
other countries were forced to make the best of the new art in order not
to lose their living, nor were there any native wood-engravers ready to
illustrate the new books. I have never myself seen or heard of a 'Caxton'
in which an illumin