Yours very truly,
B. PHILLIPS.
THE LADY OF THE BREVIARY
The Abelard Missal was lost to him forever.
When Mr. Richard Blaythwaite was alive, Robert Hooker had a small chance, one in ten thousand perhaps, of securing it and adding this beautiful memento of the Renaissance to his "museum of the imagination." But now that Blaythwaite was dead, all hope of owning it had vanished.
Hooker would not have hesitated, in the cause of the public, to have taken it by fair means or foul from Blaythwaite, but he would not rob a woman. He was singularly squeamish upon this point.
Richard Blaythwaite had left everything to his only daughter, including the famous Abelard missal.
It was a marvelous manuscript dating from the sixteenth century, and contained at the end the beautiful and tragic story of those mediæval lovers, Abelard and Heloise.
The pictures that decorated the missal, however, were its chief glory.... They were the work of Giulio Clovio, and executed by the great miniaturist for Philip the Second of Spain. The full page illuminations, with the exquisite colors, heightened with gold, were worth a king's ransom, or a queen's reputation. The binding was in keeping with the superb quality of the breviary, being in old purple morocco, the royal arms of Castile impressed in gold upon the sides.
Hooker tried in every way but could not give up the idea of being its possessor. It haunted him at night, and during the day his mind constantly reverted to its matchless colors and quaint designs.