reviser's own superintendence, possibly, in part at least, the work of his own hand. It is a large folio, finely written in a neat minuscule, mainly Saxon hand, with uncial initials in two columns. The miniatures, including their architectural details, are in the Roman manner, the ornaments partly Byzantine, partly Celtic. The great similarity of design between different manuscripts is strikingly exemplified by a comparison of three borders from (_a_) the Evangeliary of St. Vaast of Arras, fol. 28 _v._ (see Delisle); (_b_) the Evangel. in National Library, Paris, anc. fds. Lat. 257 (see Louandre), and Evangeliary No. 309 Bibl. de Cambrai (see Durieux). [17] Plate in t. 1 of Louandre. Indeed, comparisons of this kind are very instructive frequently as suggestive of _provenance_, as each working centre would have its own set of models and designs. Of course, comparison of the MSS. themselves is out of the question, but the comparisons can often be effected by the student's having Louandre, Durieux, Fleury, Labarte, etc., by his side during the examination of any given period. The limits of our little book forbid our speaking of other examples of this splendid style, but we cannot conclude without noticing that in the opinion of M. Ferdinand Denis, the Golden Gospels of St. Médard of Soissons is the most beautiful Carolingian MSS. extant. CHAPTER XII MONASTIC ILLUMINATION Introductory--Monasteries and their work from the sixth to the ninth century--The claustral schools--Alcuin--Warnefrid and Theodulf--Clerics and monastics--The Golden Age of monasticism--The Order of St. Benedict--Cistercian houses--Other Orders--Progress of writing in Carolingian times--Division of labour. In the sixth century the monasteries, such as they were, necessarily kept themselves very quiet and unobtrusive. They were situated usually in out-of-the-way corners, solitudes apart from civilisation, or, at least, apart from the busy haunts of men. In the eighth century there is a marked difference. The Capitular of Aix-la-Chapelle, of 789, required that minor schools should be attached _to all monasteries and cathedral churches_ without exception, and that children of all ranks, _both noble and servile_, should be received into them. Also that the larger monasteries should open major schools in which the seven sciences of mathematics, astronomy, arithmetic, music, rhetoric, dialectics, and geography, were to be taught--and this in two ways. There were to be two sorts of schools--interior or _claustral_, intended for monastics only, and exterior or _canonical_, intended for secular students. These schools were under separate scholastics or masters, and lay students were received in the exterior schools as freely and fully as in the public schools of the present time. Mabillon[18] gives a list of some twenty-seven monastic and cathedral schools, by no means confined to great or wealthy cities, but well distributed throughout the Empire.