It is small wonder, therefore, that
our bookmen, when they have been minded to write on their hobbies, have
sought beauty and stateliness of work where they could most readily find
them, and that the labourers in the book-field of our own country are
not numerous. Touchstone's remark, 'a poor thing, but mine own,' might,
on the worst view of the case, have suggested greater diligence at home;
but on a wider view English book-work is by no means a 'poor thing.' Its
excellence at certain periods is as striking as its inferiority at
others, and it is a literal fact that there is no art or craft connected
with books in which England, at one time or another, has not held the
primacy in Europe.
It would certainly be unreasonable to complain that printing with
movable types was not invented at a time better suited to our national
convenience. Yet the fact that the invention was made just in the middle
of the fifteenth century constituted a handicap by which the printing
trade in this country was for generations overweighted. At almost any
earlier period, more particularly from the beginning of the fourteenth
century to the first quarter of the fifteenth, England would have been
as well equipped as any foreign country to take its part in the race.
From the production of Queen Mary's Psalter at the earlier date to that
of the Sherborne Missal at the later, English manuscripts, if we may
judge from the scanty specimens which the evil days of Henry VIII.
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