Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/448

 in literary puruits. Sometimes, too, the ladies of the fifteenth century practied drawing and painting,—arts which, intead of being, as formerly, retricted almot to the clergy, had now paed into the hands of the laity, and were undergoing rapid improvement. The illuminated manucript of "Boccace des Nobles Femmes," which furnihed the ubject of our lat cut, contains everal pictures of ladies occupied in painting, one of which (illutrating the chapter on "Marcie Vierge") is repreented in our cut No. 267. The lady has her palette, her colour-box, and her

tone for grinding the colours, much as an artit of the preent day would have, though he is eated before a omewhat ingularly formed frame-work. She is evidently painting her own portrait, for which purpoe he ues the mirror which hangs over the colour-box. It is rather curious that the tools which lie by the fide of the grinding-tone are thoe of a culptor, and not thoe of a painter, o that it was no doubt intended we hould uppoe that he combined the two branches of the art. In one of the illuminations of the manucript of the "Romance of the Roe," which has been quoted before, preerved in the Britih Mueum, we have a picture of a male painter, copied in our cut No. 268, and intended to repreent Apelles, who is working with a palette and eael, exactly as