There is an elaborate full-page miniature containing the Creation and Fall, which breaks over the margin here and there. The thirteenth and fourteenth century miniaturists frequently allowed their designs to break over the framework of their diapered grounds or panels in an effective way, which pleasantly varied the formality of framed-in subjects upon the page, especially where a flat margin of colour between lines inclosed them; and some parts of the groups broke over the inner line while keeping within the limits of the outer one. Very frequently, as in this MS., a general plan is followed throughout in the spacing of the pages, though the borders and miniatures in detail show almost endless variation. In such splendid works as this we get the complete and harmonious co-operation and union between the illustrator and the decorator. The object of each is primarily to beautify his page. The illuminator makes his borders and initial letters branch and bud, and put forth leaves and flowers spreading luxuriantly up and down the margin of his vellum pages (beautiful even as the scribe left them) like a living growth; while the miniaturist makes the letter itself the shrine of some delicate saint, or a vision of some act of mercy or martyrdom; while the careless world plays hide and seek through the labyrinthine borders, as the seasons follow each other through the kalendar, and the peasant ploughs, and sows, and reaps, and threshes out the corn, while gay knights tourney in the lists, or, with ladies in their quaint attire, follow the spotted deer through the greenwood.
In these beautiful liturgical books of the Middle Ages, as we see, the ornamental feeling developed with and combined the illustrative function, so that almost any illuminated Psalter or Book of Hours will furnish not only lovely examples of floral decoration in borders and initials of endless fertility of invention, but also give us pictures of the life and manners of the times. In those of our own country we can realize how full of colour, quaint costume, and variety was life when England was indeed merry, in spite of family feuds and tyrannous lords and kings; before her industrial transformation and the dispossession of her people; ere Boards of Works and Poor-law Guardians took the place of her monasteries and abbeys; before her streams were fouled with sewage, and her cities blackened with coal smoke--the smoke of the burning sacrificed to commercial competition and wholesale production for profit by means of machine power and machine labour; before she became the workshop and engine-room of the world.