The International Weekly Miscellany - Volume I, No. 3 | Page 6

closed for thirty years. At the end of that period, the
papers were opened, and found to contain a minute account of his
perplexities and disappointments. Thus chiefly the narration of Mr.
Barber, who refers for authority to the American edition of the
Edinburgh Encyclopedia. It may be worth while for some gentleman to
attempt to find these papers. N. WEBSTER.
Rev. RUFUS W. GRISWOLD.
The papers to which Dr. Webster alludes in the above letter, have been
examined by Miss Leslie, and the curious details they contain of Fitch's
early life, his courtship, unfortunate marriage, captivity among the
Indians, experiments, &c. will be embraced in her work, which will
undoubtedly be one of the most interesting biographies of this country.
* * * * *
The director of the Museum of Paris has opened a very interesting
gallery of American antiquities, from Yucatan, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia,
and other countries of the New World.
* * * * *
ILLUMINATED BOOKS.
Mr. Owen Jones, an English architect, and the author of a very
beautiful work on the Alhambra, has been enabled, by the curious

process of chromo-lithography, originally discovered by the Bavarian,
Alois Sennefelder, to popularize and multiply almost indefinitely the
delicate and highly-finished illuminations executed by the pious
monkish artists of the middle ages.
According to Felton, the manuscript illuminators "borrowed their title
from the illumination which a bright genius giveth to his work," and
they form the connecting link in the chain which unites the ancient with
the modern schools of painting. Their works, considered as a
subordinate branch of pictorial art, though frequently grotesque and
barbarous, are singularly characteristic of the epoch in which they lived,
whether we retrace the art to its Byzantine origin in the earliest ages of
Christianity, or follow it to its most complete and harmonious
development in the two centuries which preceded the discovery of the
printing press.
The primitive Christians were possessed with an unconquerable
repugnance to the introduction of images, and the first notice we have
of the use of pictures is in the censure of the Council of Illiberis, 300
years after the Christian era. Of these one of the earliest and most
curious specimens is the consecrated banner which animated the
victorious soldiers of Constantine. The Labarum was a long pike,
topped with a crown of gold, inclosing a monogram expressive of the
cross and the two initial letters of the name of Christ, and intersected by
a transverse beam, from which hung a silken vail curiously inwrought
with the images of the reigning monarch and his children. A medal of
the Emperor Constantius is said to be still extant in which the
mysterious symbol is accompanied with the memorable words, "By this
sign shalt thou conquer." The austere simplicity of the Primitive
Christians yielded at length to this innovation of sacred splendor.
Before the end of the sixth century the use and even the worship of
images, or pictorial representations of sacred persons and subjects, was
firmly established in the capital, and those "made without hands" were
propagated in the camps and cities of the Eastern empire by monkish
artists, whose flat delineations were in the last degeneracy of taste.
In the eighth century, Leo the Isaurian ascended the throne of the East,

and for a time the public or private worship of images was proscribed,
but the edict was vigorously and successfully resisted by the Latins of
the Western church. Charlemagne, whose literary tastes are attested by
his encouragement of the learned, by the foundation of schools, and by
his patronage of the arts of music and painting, gave a great impulse to
the practice of illumination: and the Benedictines, whose influence
extended throughout Europe, assigned an eminent rank among
monastic virtues to the guardianship and reproduction of valuable
manuscripts. In each Benedictine monastery a chamber was set apart
for this sacred purpose, and Charlemagne assigned to Alcuin, a member
of their order, the important office of preparing a perfect copy of the
Scriptures.
The process of laving on and burnishing gold and silver appears to have
been familiar to oriental nations from a period of remote antiquity, and
the Greeks are supposed to have acquired from them the art of thus
ornamenting manuscripts, which they in turn communicated to the
Latins. Their most precious manuscripts were written in gold or silver
letters, on the finest semi-transparent vellum, stained of a beautiful
violet color (the imperial purple), and these were executed only for
crowned heads. One of the most ancient existing specimens of this
mode of caligraphy in the fourth century, the Codex Argenteus of
Ulphilas, the inventor of the Visigothic alphabet, was discovered in the
library of Wolfenbüttel, and is now at Upsal, Sweden. This fine MS. is
written in letters of gold and silver on a