The idea of publishing these illuminations was suggested by the great success which has attended the reprint of the Chronicles of Monstrelet and Froissart; the extensive sale of which books bears strong testimony to the searching spirit of inquiry now abroad. We are no longer content to read our early history through the filtered medium of a compilation, but seek it in the vivid pages of the chroniclers, who drew from the life, and sketched off in simple and quaint, but earnest language, the stirring panorama of their times. But the pleasure of reading such an historian as Froissart, in an ordinary printed book, is small when compared with that of reading him in one of the curious manuscripts of his own time.