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designs generally adopted in brasses, and also of certain peculiarities in their treatment and execution which at once determine and facilitate their classification.

The first great distinction to be observed in the matter of design may be considered to have been ruled by the two general varieties of form in which the plate was used. In the first of these varieties, the brasses were worked in one unbroken plate of metal, or in several plates so united as to present the appearance of one unbroken metallic surface. This was the Flemish practice, and in brasses of this variety the design (derived apparently, like the form of the plate, from the enamelled tablets of Limoges) exhibits the effigy under a canopy elaborately enriched with tabernacle work, and with figures of saints and other personages in niches; the composition being surrounded by an inscription, and beyond that by an ornamental border. The background was covered with a rich diaper, which was (generally) continued between the shafts of the canopy and the inscription, thus imparting to the canopy and to the effigy beneath it the appearance of having been cut out in metal and laid upon a carpet of gorgeous richness. This arrangement accords exactly with the altar-tomb and its effigy sculptured in relief.

Five brasses of this class yet remain in our churches—at St. Alban's, Lynn, Newark, and Topcliffe—which may be assigned to the same artist, whose hand may also be traced in the fine relics preserved in the Church of St. Sauveur, at Bruges. A fragment of a sixth great work, by the same masterly hand, is in the British Museum; it is, in my opinion, the finest specimen of these engraven memorials in existence, and I am much disposed to consider, that it may be the remains of the companion work to the brass of Abbot Delamere which once covered the