was utterly destroyed in a great bonfire made at Oxford in 1549. At the
dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII., the labour, the
learning, the genius of centuries were as nought. Exquisitely written
and illuminated Bibles, missals and other choice manuscripts,
displaying a wealth of palaeographic art to which we have lost the key,
were torn from their jewelled bindings, and were either thrown aside to
spoil and rot, or to become the prey of any who needed wrappers for
small merchandise. It is a marvel that so many should have escaped
destruction, to be collected when men had returned to their sane
senses, and formed again into libraries for the delight and instruction
of posterity to the end of time. And almost as strange as this
circumstance, is the fact that so few among us know of the existence of
these treasures which have become our national inheritance. Otherwise,
how could the reviewer of one of our foremost literary publications, in
his notice of the exhibition of medieval needlework at the Burlington
Fine Arts Club, in the spring of 1905, have discovered in it a
surprising revelation of the "refinement" of the Middle Ages?

The three last studies in the present volume are, therefore, devoted to
a description of some of the precious spoils of mediaeval refinement.
Where all is so splendidly beautiful, so deeply erudite, or so tenderly
naif, choice is difficult; but at all events, here are a few of the
priceless gems with which the Dark Ages have endowed a scornful
after-world.

And lest it should be supposed that all this mediaeval piety and
devotion sprang up suddenly, with no apparent raison d'etre, I have
gone further back, and have shown that with the first dawn of
Christianity over these Islands, religion was no other than in the
twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. The Arthurian legends,