24 AUGUST 1901, Page 23

Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Museum. With descrip- tive text

by George F. Warner, M.A. Third Series. (British Museum.)—There are fifteen plates in this series, ranging in date from 700 A.D. down to the time when the art of calligraphy became practically extinct, at the end of the fifteenth century. The earliest specimen is of an illustration from the "Lindisfarne Gospels." It is of the page which faces the first chapter of St. John's Gospel, and is an extraordinarily elaborate piece of work, which, we may say, has been reproduced with great skill by Mr. William Griggs. The manuscript accompanied the wanderings of the bones of St. Cuthbert, and was, it seems, deposited at Durham about the end of the tenth century. A doubtful mention of it occurs at Lindisfarne in 1367. After this it is hidden till, early in the seventeenth century, it was bought by Robert Cotton, Among the other plates is a specimen from a Latin Psalter of the early eleventh century. This was connected with Win- chester; it gives the names of several Winchester saints. The last is from the poems of the Duke of Orleans.