Capital letter A - this initial letter brings us back from Italian to English art. It is taken from MS Sloane No 2435, a handsomely illuminated manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth century, which has afforded us several other cuts for the present work; and forms the initial to one of the chapters of an old French medical treatise, the subject of which chapter is the diseases of women subsequent to childbirth. The doctor is examining the breast of the patient. In the humourous figure above, the illuminator has amused himself with a little satire against the monkish orders, as he has again done in another initial which is given in the present work where a monk is indulging in solitary and large potations in the cellar of the monastery.