I am indebted to a paper, read by the late Sir William Tite at a
meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, for the collation of "Books
of Hours," but there are many kinds of MSS. besides these, and it is
well to know something of them. The Horae, or Books of Hours, were
the latest development of the service-books used at an earlier
period. They cannot, in fact, be strictly called service-books,
being intended only for private devotion. But in the thirteenth
century and before it, Psalters were in use for this purpose, and
the collation of a Psalter is in truth more important than that of a
Book of Hours. It will be well for a student, therefore, to begin
with Psalters, as he can then get up the Hours in their elementary
form. I subjoin a bibliographical account of both kinds of MSS. In
the famous Exhibition at the Burlington Club in 1874, a number of
volumes was arranged to show how persistent one type of the age
could be. The form of the decorations, and the arrangement of the
figures in borders, once invented, was fixed for generations. In a
Psalter of the thirteenth century there was, under the month of
January in the calendar, a picture of a grotesque little figure
warming himself at a stove. The hearth below, the chimney-pot
above, on which a stork was feeding her brood, with the intermediate
chimney shaft used as a border, looked like a scientific preparation
from the interior anatomy of a house of the period. In one of the
latest of the MSS. exhibited on that occasion was the self-same
design again. The little man was no longer a grotesque, and the
picture had all the high finish and completeness in drawing that we
might expect in the workmanship of a contemporary of Van Eyck.
There was a full series of intermediate books, showing the gradual
growth of the picture.