Among Celtic artists, as among those of later times, the practice of working in various materials was common to the same individual, and Dagæus (d. 586) may compare with Dunstan, Eloy, Tuotilo, and others. To apply these observations to the style of illumination which now comes under our notice it may be said that if we allow the cross and arch to be copied from the Byzantine MSS. introduced from abroad, the details are undoubtedly supplied by the wickerwork and textile netting familiar to the everyday life of the artist. Assisted by the fertile imagination of bardic lore in snakes, dragons, and other mythic monsters of heroic verse, the illuminator produces a pencilled tapestry of textile fabric or flexile metal-work as marvellous as it is unique. No amount of description can give a true idea of what Celtic work is like; it must be seen to be comprehended. One glance at a facsimile of such a MS. as the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels, or those of St. Chad at Lichfield, or wherever, as at St. Gall, such work is to be met with, will supersede the most laboured attempt at description. We must therefore at once refer the reader to the facsimile. When that has been inspected, we may proceed. In the first place it may be noted that with these Occidental MSS. begins the importance and development of the initial, which, indeed, as regards the illumination of Western Europe, is the very root of the matter. It is the development of the initial letter first into the bracket, then into the border, which forms the great distinction of the "Art of Paris," as Dante calls it, from that of Byzantium. The latter is almost always of a squared or tabular design, traced and painted on a ground of burnished gold. The former exhausts itself first in fantastic lacertine forms, twisted into the shapes of the commencing letters or words of the writing, to which the suggestion of some Byzantine MS, perhaps occasionally adds a frame. Next come birds, dogs, dragons, vine-stems, and spirals embedded in couches of colour; but, whatever its character, always it is the letter that governs and originates the ornament. Only at the very end of its life, when the border has completely eclipsed the initial, is the idea of origin forgotten. Then, indeed, we find the border treillages of flower-stem or leaf-work starting from meaningless points of the design, or scattered shapelessly at random. When we meet with work of this sort, we need no further proof that the real art is dead. We have before us in such a performance--a trade production--a mere object of commerce, valuable so far as it is the result of labour, but not as a work of art.