is this altogether unjust. Lindisfarne, Winchester, Canterbury, Peterborough, some East Anglian centre or centres, may at various times have had greater artists, Eadfrith and Godeman (perhaps), de Brailes and Siferwas were great illuminators, but we have not the same right to call them founders of schools that we have in the case of the St. Alban historian, nor have we the same knowledge of their personality. It is therefore surprising and not too creditable that we wait so long for a corpus of the drawings of the Matthew Paris school, though Dr. James's Roxburghe volume La Estoire de Seint Ædward le Rei was a considerable instalment, and the fifty-four picture pages now before us are a second and even more important contribution. We must use the word “school,” for attribution to Matthew's own hand still needs caution, though Dr. James seems now more ready to credit Matthew with all the pictures in the Dublin Alban than he was when he wrote the St. Edward introduction and committed himself only as to a picture of the Virgin and Child. But it is “school” in the closest sense that we must use of this and the sister volumes, the St. Edward at Cambridge, and the St. Thomas, of which a fragment only survives in Belgium. Would that some miraculous “invention” would restore to us the lost St. Edmund, which Walsingham (or another) adds to the list. All four were certainly executed under Matthew’s direction, and the three (Alban, Thomas, Edward) are claimed by Paris himself (on the Dublin flyleaf) as his own work (“protraxi”), and what remains of them must all form part of the collection of Matthew’s work, even if not all his unaided achievement. To these must be added the first six drawings in the Lives of the Offas with certain other drawings in Cotton MS., Nero D.I., the drawings in the Historia Maior at Corpus, some of those in the lesser history, Royal MS. 14 C. vii., and doubtless also, since Dr. Lindblom pointed it out, five added drawings in the Westminster Psalter, Royal 2 A. xxii. Reproductions of some of the pictures in each of these exist, but scattered and not all good, and they have not been commented on as Dr. James could do it. Meanwhile the subscribers to this portfolio have nothing left to wish for in the quality of the collotypes or the learning and judgment of the descriptions. They owe much to Messrs. Lowe and Jacob for a very cheap book, as well as to Dr. James for a very scholarly one.
J. P. Gilson.
