The figures of Christ and the Saints, which sometimes do occur in these manuscripts, are treated in a purely ornamental and (in its stricter sense) conventional way; the hair and beard, for example, are worked up into scrolls or spiral ornaments, and the draperies are merely masses of varied colour, with little or no resemblance to the folds of a dress. _Colours without gold._ The pigments used by the Celtic monks are very varied and of the most brilliant tints, prepared with such skill that after more than a thousand years they seem as fresh and bright as ever. Among these pigments is included the fine _murex_ purple which the Irish monks used occasionally to stain sheets of vellum like those in the _Golden Gospels_ of the Byzantines. We are told by the Venerable Bede that the Irish monks had learnt how to extract this beautiful dye from a variety of the _murex_ shell-fish which is not uncommon on both shores of the Irish Channel. Splendid as they are in colour, there is one curious feature in the early Irish manuscripts of the finest class, such as the _Book of Kells_; that is, that no gold or silver either in the form of leaf or as a fluid pigment is used. This seems specially strange when we remember the close connection there was between the arts of the goldsmith and of the illuminator of manuscripts among the Irish artists. _Celtic art in Britain._ In later times, when the Celtic style of illumination was transplanted to England, gold was to some extent introduced, but in the finest Irish manuscripts of the best period, the latter half of the seventh century, gold is completely absent. Nevertheless, so great was the decorative genius of these Irish monks that, even without burnished gold and silver, their illuminated pages quite equal, not only in artistic beauty, but even in mere splendour of effect, any illuminations that have ever been produced. _The Book of Durrow._ In addition to the _Book of Kells_ another manuscript of similar style and date and of almost equal splendour should be mentioned, the _Book of Durrow_[65], which, like the _Book of Kells_, was also known as the "Gospels of Saint Columba," who is said to have left behind him, at his death in 597, no less than three hundred manuscripts written with his own hand. It is not impossible that the _Book of Durrow_ is one of these, as it bears some signs of being earlier in date than the _Book of Kells_. _Monks of Iona._