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everything simply according to the best idea they had 
attained. They worked by the clearest light of their own time. 
There was a sort of sturdy self-respect in their workman- 
ship. They did not think that their own best forms were 
prosy and commonplace, and when they wanted something 
unusually beautiful run after the ruder forms of an earlier 
age. They had the thought of the beautiful, but they seem 
to have been happily innocent of that sentimental distortion 
of the sense of beauty which leads to the artificial manufac- 
ture of the picturesque. So you tread confidently and 
firmly as you trace back the ways of the ancient life. You 
may be walking among rude and imperfect things, but at 
any rate you are not walking among shams. The student of 
old manuscripts will tell you the age of a Greek codex by 
the uncial or cursive character in which it is written. If 
you find a tomb inscribed in the old, so-called “Lombardic” 
characters, you feel pretty sure that it is not later than the 
13th or beginning of the 14th century, nor can it be 
much earlier, for previously the tombstones, coffin lids, had 
crosses, but not inscriptions on them. When you come 
across a rude circle of stones upon the moors above Ilkley, 
you may doubt if it was a hut circle, or a Druid Temple ; 
but at any rate you are not haunted by a misgiving that it 
Avas only a freak of some early monk of Bolton Priory, with 
a taste for the picturesque. If you are pointed to an apparent 
date of 1174, like that which stands on the gable of an old 
house near Sowerby Bridge, you know, at any rate, that it 
cannot really be of 1174, because the Koman numerals were 
still universally in use, and the so-called Arabic figures 
hardly even known in England, till two centuries later. 
If you meet with an early undated specimen of printing 
and find some words in it in italics, you know that it can- 
not be earlier than 1501 when the great Venetian printer 
Aldus Manuzio first introduced the new slanting letters 
which he had had cut, in the series of works which liave 
