was a copy of the
Gospels which St. Felix of Burgundy, the apostle of the East Angles,
brought with him in the seventh century. It was after his death in a
monastery at Dunwich. Then it passed to a little priory at Eye, where
Leland saw it. After the Dissolution it remained with the Corporation of
Eye--now extinct--and people took oaths upon it. It is traceable in the
records down to a comparatively late date--within the nineteenth
century. Can there be truth in the tale I have heard that it was sent
for safe keeping to a mansion not far off, and there cut up for game
labels? I cannot believe it.

No doubt MSS. were cut up for game labels. I have seen--years ago--in a
London shop one that had turned up in a billiard-room, and its blank
margins had been many of them removed for that purpose. But there was a
fashion equally reprehensible a hundred years ago of cutting out
illuminations from MSS. and making scrap-books of them. It was
especially common in the case of the great antiphoners and other huge
service-books which stood on the lecterns in Italian churches. The
remainder of the books went to the gold-beaters, perhaps (they used
parchment, and in England bought MSS. sometimes to cut up), or to a like
destination. Occasionally books so mutilated have been reconstituted. A
leading example is that of a Josephus, illuminated in part by the great
Tours artist Jean Foucquet. This the late King Edward VII. and Mr. H. Y.
Thompson were able to combine in restoring. The King had a number of the
pictures, cut out, in his library at Windsor; Mr. Thompson had the
mutilated text and a pictured leaf or so. The fragments were brought
together and presented to the Paris Library, which already possessed the
first volume of the set.

A miniature, cut, no one knows how long ago, from a fine twelfth-century
Bible, was shaken out of a pile of printed copies of a funeral sermon at
a country house. The book to which it belonged I believe to be one at
Lambeth.

In 1890 Mr. Samuel Sandars bought at a London sale a scrap-book
containing two leaves of a beautiful and very early Book of Hours. He
gave them to the Fitzwilliam Museum. In 1894 came the Fountaine sale,
and then Mr. William Morris bought the MS. from which these leaves had
come. An arrangement was made between him and the museum that he should
possess the leaves, replaced in the book, for his life, and then the
museum should acquire the whole at an agreed price. Alas! he did not