Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: dignity; and the draperies are arranged with unusual simplicity and breadth. There was also another very curious mode of carving statuettes of the Virgin, of which extant specimens are extremely rare, and none (it is believed) is to be found in England. There is one, well known, in the gallery of the Louvre, engraved in the useful book of M. Viollet le Due, dic- tionnaire de mobilier Fratifais. It is a sitting figure of our Lady, who is holding the Infant on her knees. The front part is divided down the middle and two wings fall back on hinges, leaving a centrepiece and forming a triptych of the usual character. There are scenes from the Passion on the wings, and the Crucifixion is carved upon the centre. The date of the ivory is early in the fourteenth century ; but the fashion of this kind of statuette can be traced to a much earlier time. An entry in an inventory of the church of Notre Dame at Paris in 1343 mentions one : " quaedam alia ymago eburnea valde antiqua scisa per medium et cum ymaginibus sculptis in appertura, que solebat poni super magnum altare." Occasionally statuettes are mentioned in English inventories; thus in the inventory of Roger de Mortimer, a coffer is included, containing with other things " j parvam imaginem beatae Virginisde ebore." Again, " a lityll longe box of yvery with an ymage of our lady of yvery therein closyd" is named among the goods belonging in 1534 to the guild of St. Mary the Virgin at Boston, in Norfolk. A very fine statuette of English work, more than nine inches in height, has been for some years on loan to the South Kensington museum; it belonged to the late Mr. Hope Scott, and was formerly Lord Shrewsbury's. The Virgin is in a sitting position and holds a large flower in her right hand. She wears a crown un... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.