while in England it has progressed steadily from the Harleian era to Roger Payne. Theirs was not a servile imitation of ancient work, although Mr. Roscoe wrote eloquently in commendation of ancient binding in his “Lorenzo de Medici.” “A taste for the exterior decoration of books has lately arisen in this country, in the gratification of which no small share of ingenuity has been displayed; but if we are to judge of the present predilection for learning by the degree of expense thus incurred we must consider it as greatly inferior to that of the Romans during the time of the first emperors or of the Italians at the fifteenth century. And yet it is difficult to discover why a favorite book should not be as proper an object of elegant ornament as the head of a cane, the hilt of a sword or the latchet of a shoe.”
Wisely and truly said, but for the consideration that the invention of printing was of that inferiority the causa causans, the manuscripts that were “all wrought in gold” being masterpieces of handicraft in themselves.
The prejudice in favor of ancient binding was displayed as recently as in the report of the International Bookbinding Exhibition of 1857, wherein the judges—Merlin, Capé and Bauzonnet—expressed the opinion
