with what art its various parts are arranged, grouped, placed at certain intervals from each other; we must seek to discover the contrivance by virtue of which the immense évidage (sloping) of numerous buttresses, the height of the towers, the retiring of the laterals, and the curve of the apse are harmonised; we must enter the church and stand in its nave, with its interminable delicate ribs—how many clusters of small columns extend above the slender pillars!—we must contemplate the beautiful fancies of the rose-windows, which by their many-coloured glass sober down the glare of the light passing through them; we must gain the summit of those towers, those spires, and from them command the dizzy extent of aërial

space, and the landscape stretching out around them below; we must follow attentively with our eye the strikingly bold outlines which the turrets, the ornamented gables, the guivres, the tops of the bell-towers trace upon the sky. This done, we should yet have paid but a brief tribute of attention to these prodigious edifices. What, then, if we wished to devote sufficient time to the ornamentation of the details (Figs. 309 to 312)? if we desired to obtain a tolerably exact idea of the people from the statues which swarm from the porch to the pinnacle, and of the flora and fauna, real or ideal, that give movement to every projection or animate every wall? if one counted on success in finding out the key to all the crossings and intersections of the lines, of the well-adjusted conceptions which, while they deceive the eye, contribute to the majesty or the solidity of the whole? if, finally, we were most careful not to lose any one of the multifarious thoughts that have been fixed in the stones of the gigantic edifice? The mind becomes confused; and certainly the effect produced by so much imagination and so much enterprise, by so much skill and taste, wonderfully elevates the soul, which searches with more love after the Creator when it sees such a work proceeding from the hands of the creature.

When you approach the Gothic church, when you stand beneath its lofty roof, it is as if a new country were receiving you, possessing you, casting around you an atmosphere of subduing reverie in which you feel your wretched servitude to worldly interests vanishing away, and you become conscious of more solid, more important ties, springing up in you. The Deity whom our finite nature can figure to ourselves seems in fact to inhabit this immense building, to be willing to put himself in direct communion with the humble Christian who approaches to bow down before Him. There is nothing in it of the human dwelling-place—all relating to our poor and miserable existence is here forgotten; He for whom this residence was constructed is the Strong, the Great, the Magnificent, and it is from a paternal condescension that He receives us into His holy habitation, as weak, little, miserable. It is the ideal of the faith which is realised; all the articles of the belief in which we have been brought up are here embodied before our eyes; it is, lastly, the chosen spot where the meeting of mortal nothingness and Divine Majesty is quietly accomplished.

The Christianity of the Middle Ages had then been able to find in the Gothic style a tongue as tractable as it was energetic, as simple as it was ingenious, which, for the pious excitement of souls, was to declare to the senses all its ineffable poetry. But as the unbounded faith, of which it was the faithful organ, was on the next dawn of its most ardent aspirations about to decline, so this splendid style was almost as soon to lose its vigour, and to exhaust itself in the unrestrained manifestation of its power.

Springing into existence with the warm enthusiasm of the first Crusades, the Pointed style seems to follow in its different phases the decline of faith in the time of these adventurous enterprises. It began by a sincere outburst, and was produced by a bold, unshackled genius; then a factitious or reflected ardour gave birth to elaborateness and mannerism; then the fervent zeal and the artistic sentiment dwindled away: this is the decadency.

Gothic art raised itself in less than a century to its culminating point; within two centuries more it was to reach the fatal point where it would begin to decline. The thirteenth century saw it in all its glory, with the edifices we have mentioned; in the fourteenth it had become the Florid or Rayonnant Gothic, which produced the churches of St. Ouen at Rouen, and of St. Etienne at Metz. “Then,” says M. A. Lefèvre, one of the latest historians of architecture, “no more walls; everywhere open screen-work supported by slender arcades; no more capitals, rows of foliage imitated directly from nature; no more columns, lofty pillars ornamented with round or bevelled mouldings. As yet, however, there was nothing weakly in its extreme elegance; slim and delicate without being gaunt, the Florid style did not in the least disfigure the churches of the thirteenth century, which it bounded and decorated.

“But after the Rayonnant Gothic came the Flamboyant, which, always under the pretext of lightness and grace, denaturalises the ornaments, the forms, and even the proportions of the architectural members. It effaces the horizontal lines which used to give two stories to the windows of the nave, fills up the nave with irregular compartments, cœurs, soufflets, and flammes; suppresses the angles of the pillars and sharpens the mouldings; leaves even to the most massive supports nothing but an undulating, vanishing, impalpable form, where shadow cannot fix itself; changes the lancet-arches into braces, or into flat-arched vaults more or less depressed, and the florid ornamentation of the pinnacles into whimsical scrolls. It reserved all its riches for accessory or exterior decorations, stalls, pulpits, hanging key-stones, running friezes, rood-screens, and bell-towers. Visible decadency of the whole corresponds with great progress in details.” (Fig. 313.)

The churches of St. Wulfran, Abbeville; of Notre-Dame, Cléry-sur-Loire; of St. Riquier; of Corbeil; and the cathedrals of Orleans and of Nantes, may be cited as the principal specimens of the Flamboyant style, and as the last notable manifestations of an art which thenceforward diverged more and more from its original inspiration. The middle of the fifteenth century is generally fixed as the limit beyond which the handsome Gothic buildings that still rose were no longer, in any degree, the normal productions of their period, but were felicitous copies or imitations of works already consecrated by the history of the art.

A remark may here be made showing to what extent religious feeling predominated in the Middle Ages; it is that at the very moment when the Norman and Gothic architects were designing and producing so many marvellous habitations for the Deity, they seemed to bestow scarcely any attention on the construction of comfortable or luxurious dwellings for man, even those destined for the most exalted personages of the State. In proportion as this sentiment of original faith lost its intensity, Art occupied itself more and more with princely and lordly habitations. The middle class was the last favoured by this progress, and the feeling of their position as citizens had taken the place of a zeal exclusively pious; so we find the “town-halls” absorbing the splendour and elegance of which private houses remained destitute; these being generally built of wood and plaster, and in the heart of the towns, so close together that they seemed to be disputing for light and air.

Everywhere, during the Middle Ages, rose the church—the home of peace; but everywhere also towered up at the same time the castle, that characterised the permanent state of war in which feudal society lived, delighted, and gloried.

“The castles of the richest and most powerful nobles,” says M. Vaudoyer, “consisted of irregular, uncomfortable buildings, pierced with a few narrow windows, standing within one or two fortified enclosures, and surrounded by moats. The donjon, a large high tower, generally occupied the centre, and other towers, more or less numerous, flanked the walls, and served for the defence of the place.” (Fig. 314). “These castles,” adds M. Mérimée, “generally present the same characteristics as the ancient castellum; but a certain ruggedness, a striking quaintness in plan and execution, bear witness to a personal will, and that tendency to isolation which is the instinctive sentiment of the feudal system.”

In most of the buildings destined for the privileged classes, it seems as if it were deemed unnecessary that care should be taken to secure harmony of form. The decorative style of the period showed itself chiefly in the interior of some of the principal apartments, the habitable quarters of the lord of the castle and of his family. There were vast fireplaces with enormous chimney-corners surmounted by projecting mantelpieces; the vaulted roof was ornamented with pendents of various devices, and with painted or carved escutcheons. Narrow closets, contrived in the walls, served as sleeping places. The embrasures of the windows pierced in the excessively thick walls formed so many little chambers, raised a few steps above the floor of the room to which they admitted light. Stone seats ran along each side of these embrasures. Here the inmates of the tower generally sat when the cold did not oblige them to draw near to the fireplaces. (Figs. 315 and 316.)

If the Norman church expresses with gentle severity, and the Gothic church with sumptuous fancy, the important and sublime doctrines of the Gospel, we must equally allow that the castle, in some sort, loudly proclaims the stern and uncivilised notions of the feudal authority of which it was at once the instrument and the symbol.

Evidently, if the castle raises its gloomy head high into the air, it has no other object in doing so than to secure to itself the advantages of distance and height; but not the less on that account does it stand out on the sky a grand object. The masses of its walls unsymmetrically pierced with sombre loop-holes present an abrupt and naked appearance; but the monotony of their lines is picturesquely broken by the projection of overhanging turrets, by the corbels of the machicolated arches, and by the embrasures of the battlements.

A vast amount of civilisation still exists for him who recalls the past in the multitude of ruins which were the witnesses of bloody feudal divisions; and we must add to the system of isolated castles that often commanded the most deserted valleys, the apparatus of strength and defence of cities and towns—gates, ramparts, towers, citadels, &c., immense works which, although inspired solely by the genius of strife and dissension, did not fail nevertheless, in many instances, to combine harmony and variety of detail with the general grandeur of the whole.

We may cite, as examples of architecture purely feudal, the castles of Coucy (Fig. 317), Vincennes (Fig. 318), Pierrefonds, the old Louvre, the Bastille, the Tour de Nesle (Fig. 319), the Palais de Justice, Plessis-les-Tours, &c.; and as specimens of the fortified town in the Middle Ages, Avignon and the city of Carcassonne. Let us add that Aigues-Mortes, in Provence; Narbonne, Thann (Haut-Rhin), Vendôme, Villeneuve-le-Roi, Moulins, Moret (Fig. 320), Provins (Fig. 321), afford yet again the most characteristic remains of analogous fortifications.

While the nobles, jealous and suspicious, sheltered themselves in the shadow of their donjons built with many strategical contrivances and of substantial materials; while the large and small towns were surrounded with deep moats, high walls, impregnable towers, the most primitive simplicity presided over the construction of private dwellings. Stone hardly ever, and brick but seldom, figured among the number of the materials employed. Sawed or squared timbers serving as ribs, mud or clay filling up the interstices, were all that was at first required for the erection of houses as small as they were comfortless, and following each other in irregular lines along the narrow streets. The beams of the corbels, it is true, began to be adorned with carvings and paintings, the façades with panes (glass) of different colours; but we must reach the last half of the fifteenth century before we see the resources of architecture applied to the erection and ornamentation of private houses. Moreover, faith was already growing weak; and no longer was it possible to direct all the resources of an entire province to the honour of the Deity by the erection of a church; the use of gunpowder, by revolutionising the art of war, came to lessen, if it did not annihilate, the vast strength of walls; the decline of feudalism itself had commenced; and, lastly, the enfranchisement of corporations gave rise to a perfectly new order of individuals who took their place in history. We must refer to this period the house of Jacques Cœur, Bourges; the Hôtel de Sens, Paris (Fig. 322); the Palais de Justice, Rouen; and those town-halls in which the belfry was then considered as a sort of palladium, in whose shade the sacred rights of the community sheltered themselves. It is in our (French) northern towns—St. Quentin, Arras, Noyon; and in the ancient cities of Belgium—Brussels (Fig. 323), Louvain, Ypres, that these edifices assume the most sumptuous character.

In Germany, where for a time it reigned almost exclusively, Gothic art established the cathedrals of Erfurt, of Cologne, Fribourg, and of Vienna; then it died away in the growth of the Flamboyant style. In England, after having left some magnificent examples of pure inspiration, it found its decline in the attenuated meagreness and the complicated ornamentation of the style called Perpendicular ogival. If it penetrated also into Spain, it was to contend with difficulty against the mighty Moorish school, which had too many imposing chefs-d’œuvre in the past to surrender without resistance the country of its former triumphs (Fig. 324). In Italy it clashed not only with the Latin and Byzantine schools, but also with a style that, just beginning to form itself, was soon to dispute with it the empire of taste, and to dethrone it in that very land which had been its cradle. The cathedrals of Assisi, of Siena, of Milan, are the splendid works in which its influence triumphed over local traditions and over the Renaissance that was preparing to follow; yet we must not think that it succeeded even there in rendering itself absolutely the master, as it had done on the Rhenish or British territories. Sacrifices were made in its favour; but these sacrifices did not amount to an entire immolation.

When we use the word Renaissance, we seem to be speaking of a return to an age already gone by, of the resurrection of a period that had passed away. It is not strictly in this sense that the word must be understood in the present instance.

Inheriting from of old the artistic temperament of Greece, rather than spontaneously creating of herself any style, Italy, among all the nations of Europe, was the country which had most successfully resisted the profound

darkness of barbarism, and the first on which the light of modern civilisation shone.

At the period of this new dawn of genius, Italy had only to ransack the ruins its first magnificence had bequeathed it to find among them examples it might follow; moreover, it was the time when the active rivalry of its republics caused all the treasures of ancient Greece to flow into it. But while it derived inspiration from these abundant manifestations of another age, it never entertained the idea of abandoning itself exclusively to a servile imitation; it had—and in this consists its chief title to glory—while giving a peculiar direction to the revivals of the antique, the good sense to remain under the poetic influence of that simple and congenial art which had consoled the world during the whole continuance of that protracted infancy of a civilisation which was at last advancing with rapid strides towards perfect manhood.

From the twelfth century, Pisa gave an impetus to the art by building its Duomo, its Baptistery, its Leaning Tower, and the cloisters of its famous Campo Santo; so many admirable works forming an era in the history of modern art, and in a brilliant manner opening the career on which so many distinguished men were to enter, rivalling each other in invention, in science, and in genius. In these monuments the union of Oriental taste with the traditions of ages gone by created an originality as grand as it was graceful. “It is,” as M. A. Lefèvre points out, “the Antique without its nudity, the Byzantine without its heaviness, the fervour of the Western Gothic without its ghastliness” (effroi).

In 1294 the magistrates of Florence passed the following decree, charging the architect, Arnolfo di Cambio, to convert into a cathedral the church, till then of little importance, of Santa Maria de’ Fiori:—“Forasmuch,” they said, “as it is in the highest degree prudent for a people of illustrious origin to proceed in their affairs in such manner that their public works may cause their grandeur and wisdom to be acknowledged, the order is given to Arnolfo, master-architect of our town, to make plans for repairing the Church of Santa Maria with the greatest and most lavish magnificence, so that the skill and prudence of men may never invent, nor ever be able to undertake, anything more important or more beautiful.”

Arnolfo applied himself to his task, and conceived a plan which the shortness of human life did not allow him to carry out; but Giotto succeeded

him, and to Giotto succeeded Orcagna, and to Orcagna, Brunelleschi, who designed and almost completed that Duomo, of which Michael Angelo said it would be difficult to equal, and impossible to surpass, it.

Arnolfo, Giotto, Orcagna, Brunelleschi—does it not suffice to cite these great names for us to form an idea of the movement going on at this period? and which was soon to produce Alberti, Bramante, Michael Angelo, Jacques della Porta, Baldassare Peruzzi, Antonio and Juliano de Sangallo, Giocondo, Vignola, Serlio, and even Raphael, who, when he liked, was as mighty an architect as he was a marvellous painter. It was in Rome that these princes of the art congregated together, as the splendours of St. Peter’s (Fig. 325), to mention only one of their grand creations, still attest; so, it is from this city that henceforward light and example are to come.

In the style which this masterly phalanx created, the Latin rounded arch regained all its ancient favour, and united itself to the ancient orders, which became intermingled, or, at any rate, superposed. The ogive was abandoned, but the columns to decorate their capitals, and the entablatures to give more grace to their projections, borrowed a certain fantastical style which yielded in nothing to the ogival; the Grecian pediment reappeared, changing sometimes the upper lines of its triangle into a depressed semicircle; lastly the cupola, that striking object which was the characteristic feature of the Byzantine style, became the dome, whose ample curve defied, in the daring heights whereto it rose, the wonders of the Perpendicular Gothic.

The Italian Renaissance was now accomplished, the Gothic age at an end. Rome and Florence sent in every direction their architects, who, as they travelled far from these metropolises of the new style, were once more subjected to certain territorial influences, but who knew how to make the tradition of which they were the apostles triumphant. It was then that France inaugurated in its turn a Renaissance peculiar to herself; it was then that, under the reign of Charles VIII., after his expedition into Italy, began, with the Château de Gaillon, a long succession of edifices, which in many cases yielded neither in richness nor in majesty to the works of the preceding period. Under Louis XII. rose the Château de Blois, and the Hôtel de la Cour des Comptes, Paris, a splendid building destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century. Under Francis I., Chambord (Fig. 326), Fontainebleau, Madrid (near Paris), magnificent royal “humours,” contended in

elegance and grace with the châteaux of Nantouillet, Chenonceaux, and Azai-le-Rideau; and with the manor-house of Ango, near Dieppe, all sumptuous, lordly mansions; the old Louvre, the palace of kings, the cradle of monarchy, was regenerated under the care of Peter Lescot; the Hôtel de Ville, Paris, still bears witness to the varied talent of Dominique Cortona, who, as M. Vaudoyer said of him, “justly understood that, in building for France, he should act in a perfectly different manner to that in which he would have acted in Italy.” Under Henry II. and Charles IX. this activity continued, and the architects who sought their inspirations in Grecian and Roman antiquity, as much as in the souvenirs of the Italian Renaissance, delighted in loading all the elegant and graceful buildings with ornaments, with bas-reliefs, and with statues, which they seemed to carve in the stone, as delicately wrought as a piece of goldsmith’s work. Philibert Delorme built for Diana of Poitiers the Château d’Anet, that architectural jewel whose portico, transported piece by piece at the time of the revolutionary disorders, now decorates the court of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; Jean Bullant built Ecouen for the Constable Anne de Montmorency; and the architect d’Anet undertook, by order of Catherine de Medicis, the construction of the Palace of the Tuileries, which, by a sort of exigency resulting from its particular destination, seemed typically to characterise the style of the French Renaissance.

We must not burden with details this summary of one of the most important branches of art. The history of architecture is among those vast domains which demand either a short epitome or a thoroughly deep investigation. The epitome being alone consistent with the plan of our work, we must confine ourselves to its limits; but we may, perhaps, be allowed to think that the few rapid pages thus devoted to the subject have inspired the reader with the desire of penetrating farther into a study which is capable of offering him so many agreeable surprises, so many rational delights.

PARCHMENT AND PAPER.

ALTHOUGH most authors who speak of parchment attribute the invention of it, on the testimony of Pliny, to Eumenius, king of Pergamus (doubtlessly from the etymology of the word by which it was designated, viz., Pergamena), it seems to be proved, according to Peignot, that the use of it is much more ancient, and that its origin is utterly lost. Certainly, in many passages of the Old Testament we find a Hebrew Word, in Latin volumen, which can only be understood to mean a roll formed of prepared skin or of the leaves of papyrus, and it is consequently evident that the Jews, from the time of Moses, wrote the tables of the Law on rolls of parchment.

Herodotus says that the Ionians called books diphthera (διφθἑρα, a prepared hide), because, at a time when the biblos (βἱβλος, the inner bark of the papyrus) was scarce, they wrote on skins of goats or of sheep. Diodorus Siculus affirms that the ancient Persians wrote their annals on skins, and we must suppose that Pliny’s assertion refers only to some improvements the King of Pergamus had made in the art of preparing a material that could supply the place of papyrus, which Ptolemy Epiphanius would no longer allow to leave Egypt. The absolute deficiency of papyrus raised into activity the fabrication of parchment, and soon so large a quantity was seen to flow into Pergamus that this town was considered as the cradle of the new trade, already so flourishing. There were then books of two kinds, the one in rolls composed of many leaves sewed together, on one side of which only was there writing; the others, square-shaped, were written upon both sides. The grammarian Crates, ambassador of Eumenius at Rome, passed as the inventor of vellum.

Ordinary parchment is the skin of a goat, sheep, or lamb, prepared in lime, dressed, scraped, and rendered smooth by pumice-stone. Its principal qualities are whiteness, thinness, and stiffness; but the work of the currier must have been formerly very imperfect, for Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours in the eleventh century, tells us that the writer, before beginning his occupation, “was in the habit of clearing away from the parchment, with the aid of a razor, the remains of fat and other gross impurities, and then with pumice-stone to make the hair and tendons disappear:” this almost amounts to affirming that the scribes bought the hide undressed, and, by an elaborate preparation, made them fit for proper use. Virgin parchment, which in its grain and colour resembles vellum, was made of the skins of those lambs and goats which had been clipped. Vellum, more polished, whiter, more transparent, is made, as its name indicates, of the hide of the calf.[52]

It is probable that with the Romans, papyrus, considering the facility they had of procuring it for themselves, was more frequently used than parchment, which, at first, was rare and costly. But parchment, more durable and of greater resistance than papyrus, was reserved for the transcription of the most important works. Cicero, who had many books on parchment in his magnificent library, said that he had seen the “Iliad” copied on a scroll of pergamena which went into a nut-shell. Many of Martial’s epigrams prove to us that in the time of this poet books of such kind were still more numerous. Unfortunately, there remains to us no writing on parchment dating from this distant period. The Virgil in the Vatican, and the Terence at Florence, are of the fourth and fifth century of our era. Admitting that time destroys all, and also that the work of the rude tribes on many occasions assisted this natural cause of destruction, we must not forget that at certain periods, to supply the place of new parchment when it was scarce, a plan had been devised of making the parchment rolls which had already been used for manuscripts serve again

for a similar purpose, either by scraping and rubbing them with pumice-stone, or by boiling them in water or soaking in lime. There is no doubt but the scarceness and the dearness of parchment was the cause of the loss of very many excellent works. Muratori cites, for example, a manuscript of the Ambrosian Library, of which the writing, dating from eight or nine centuries back, had been substituted for another of more than a thousand years old; and Maffei informs us that the employment of ancient parchment scraped and washed became so general, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, throughout Germany, that the Emperors put a stop to this dangerous abuse by issuing an order to the notaries to use nothing but parchment “quite new.”

Generally, the quality of parchment serves to determine the date of its manufacture. The vellum of manuscripts till the middle of the eleventh century is very white and thin; the parchment of the twelfth century is thick, rough, and brownish, which often shows it has been scraped or washed. The greater number of fine manuscripts are on

virgin parchment, which from its nature was suited to the delicacies of calligraphy and illumination. Moreover, we see from a statute of the University of Paris, dated 1291, that the parchment trade had attained at that period to considerable development; so, as a protection against the frauds and deceptions which might result from the great competition of traders in it, and to insure a good article being furnished to students and artists, a special privilege was granted to the university, which, in the person of its rector, had not only the right of inspection, but also the refusal of all parchment bought in Paris, no matter whence it had come. Besides which, at the fair of Lendit, which was held every year at Saint-Denis, on the domains of the abbey (Fig. 329), and at the fair of Saint-Lazare, the rector likewise caused the parchment brought to them to be examined, and the merchants of Paris could not purchase any till the king’s agents, those of the Bishop of Paris, and the masters and scholars of the university, had provided themselves with what they required (Fig. 330). Let us add that the rector was paid a duty on all parchment sold, and the result of this tax was the only source of income attached to the rectorship in the seventeenth century.

Although white parchment seems to be the best suited for writing, the Middle Ages, following the example of antiquity, gave to the material various tints, especially purple and yellow. The purple was chiefly intended to receive characters of gold or silver. The Emperor Maximinius, the younger, inherited from his mother the works of Homer inscribed in gold on purple vellum; and parchment tinted in this way was, during the first centuries, one of the prerogatives reserved for princes and the great dignitaries of the Church. It is remarkable that the barbarism of the seventh and eighth centuries did not diminish the favour in which these luxurious manuscripts were held. Little by little, however, the custom (of writing the entire work in gold or colours) dwindled away. Scribes began by colouring a few pages only in each volume, then some margins or frontispieces; and lastly this decoration was restricted to the heads of chapters, or to words to which great prominence was to be given, or to capital letters. The rubricatores (literally, writers in red), workmen who performed this operation, came in time to be mere painters of letters or rubrics (so called because they were originally painted red), of whose assistance, however, the first printers availed themselves to rubric or colour the initials of missals, Bibles, and law books.

The dimensions or sizes of our books at the present day have their origin in the sizes of the parchment in olden times. The entire skin of the animal, cut square and folded in two, represented the “in-folio,” which, moreover, varied in length and breadth; and we have every reason to suppose that paper, from the day it was invented, followed the ordinary sizes of the folded parchment.

As to the dimensions of the parchment employed for diplomas, they varied according to the time, the brevity of the matter, or the nature of its employment. Among the ancients, who wrote only on one side of the parchment, the skins were cut in bands joined together so as to form volumes or rolls, which were unrolled as their contents were read. This custom was preserved for public and judicial acts for a long time after the invention of the square book (codex) had caused the opisthographic writing to be adopted, by which is to be understood writing on both sides of the page. In principle, only the final formulæ, or the signatures, were written on the back of the document. By degrees people adopted the practice of writing on the back as well as the front of the page; but it was not till the sixteenth century that this custom became general.

Judicial acts, composed sometimes of many skins sewed together, came in time to form rolls of twenty feet in length; to such extreme proportions did they reach, though at first they were so small in size that their limited dimensions are truly incredible; for in 1233 and 1252 we find contracts of sales of two inches long by five inches wide, and in 1258 a will written on a piece of parchment of two inches by three and a half. It was by way of compensating for the great cost of parchment that opisthographic writing was adopted and rolls were put aside; and the name alone remains as applied to the rolls of procedure. The size that leaves should assume was also fixed, according to the different uses for which they were intended. For instance, the leaves of parliamentary documents were nine inches and a half long by seven and a half wide; those of the council, ten by eight; those of finance and of private contracts, twelve and a half by nine and a half; letters of pardon, under the king’s hand, were to be on entire skins squared, two feet two inches by one foot eight inches in diameter.

But while the use of parchment was still strictly employed in the chancellor’s offices and the tribunals, where the basoche (a brotherhood of lawyers of all grades) considered it as one of their most lucrative privileges (Fig. 331), it had for a long while ceased to be used anywhere else. Paper, after having during many centuries competed with parchment, at last almost entirely replaced it (Fig. 332); for if less durable, it had the great advantage of costing much less. Formerly nothing but the ancient papyrus of Egypt was known, and it was made use of concurrently with parchment till there was brought into Europe, towards the tenth century, cotton paper, which is generally believed to be a Chinese invention, and which was at first called Grecian parchment, because the Venetians, who introduced it into the West, had found it in use in Greece.

Actually, this paper was at first of a very inferior quality, coarse, spongy, dull, and subject to the attacks of damp and worms; so much so that the Emperor Frederick II. issued, in 1221, an order declaring null and void all documents written on it, and fixing the term at two years by which all were to be transcribed on parchment.

The use and the knowledge of the process of manufacturing paper from cotton soon led to the fabrication of paper from linen or rags. It is, however, impossible to say when and where it was accomplished—the assertions and the testimonies on this point are so contradictory. Some think that the paper was brought from the East by the Spanish Saracens; others say it came from China; these affirm it has been employed since the tenth century; those, that we can only find specimens of it as far back as the reign of St. Louis.