We turn to the west of Europe, and we shall see how in the elaborately ornamented Frankish MSS. of the Carolingian school was combined the lingering tradition of the classical style with a new and independent element which had grown up spontaneously in the north. This new factor was the Celtic art which had its origin and was brought to perfection in the illuminated MSS. of Ireland and afterwards of Britain. It will therefore be convenient to trace the history of that school of book ornamentation. But before doing so we must dispose, in few words, of the more primitive style which preceded the Carolingian development in western continental Europe. This primitive style, which we may call the native style, as distinguished from the more artificially compounded art of the revival under Charlemagne, seems to have been widely extended throughout the Frankish empire and to have been common in Lombardy, and to some degree in Spain, as well as in France, and is known as Merovingian and Franco-Lombardic. This kind of ornamentation appears chiefly in the form of initial letters composed of birds, fishes and animals contorted into the shapes of the alphabetical letters; and in a less degree of head-pieces and borders filled with interlacings, or bands, or geometrical patterns, and even details of animal life. In these patterns, barbarous as they usually are, the influence of such artistic objects as mosaics and enamels is evident. The prevailing colours are crude green, red, orange and yellow, which hold their place with persistence through successive generations of MSS. This native style also, in course of time, came under Celtic influence, and adopted into its scheme the interlaced designs of animal forms and other details of the ornament of the north. It is therefore necessary to bear in mind that, side by side with the great series of Carolingian MSS., executed with all possible magnificence, there was existent this native school producing its examples of a more rustic character, which must be taken into account when studying the development of the later national style in France, in the 10th and succeeding centuries. Celtic