It is not to be
taken by modern students as the only possible model or basis simply
because it was the best of its kind. There is no such despotism in art.
To those who think it the only possible form of book decoration, let it
be so by all means, but we may as well hope to clothe our soldiers in
chain or plate armour, and send the elite of our nobility on another
crusade to Jerusalem, or satisfy our universities with the _quod libets_
and _quiddities_ of the _trivium_ and _quadrivium_, as hope to make
popular to the England of the twentieth century the artistic tastes of
the fourteenth. We indulge in no such dreams. If we are to have
illuminated books, our own age must invent them. The illuminators of the
Bibles, Romances, Mirrors, and Chronicles of the fourteenth century no
doubt did their best, and we honour and praise them for it. We think
their work among the loveliest gratifications of the eye that can be
imagined. But the eye is very catholic--it has immense capacities for
enjoyment. The window of the soul opens on illimitable prospects, and if
the soul be satisfied for the time, it is not necessarily repleted for
ever. Golden ages are cyclical, and it may be that the glory of the
books of the future shall surpass all the glories of the past.
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