There are some early monuments of Christian art dating from the fourth century in which the lyre is represented. In one of them Christ is depicted as Apollo touching the lyre. This instrument occurs at an early period in western Europe as used in popular pastimes. In an Anglo-saxon manuscript of the ninth century in the British museum (Cleopatra C. VIII.) are the figures of two gleemen, one playing the lyre and the other a double-pipe. M. de Coussemaker has published in the “Annales Archéologiques” the figure of a crowned personage playing the lyre, which he found in a manuscript of the ninth or tenth century in the library at Angers. The player twangs the strings with his fingers, while the Anglo-saxon gleeman before mentioned uses a plectrum. _Cithara_ was a name applied to several stringed instruments greatly varying in form, power of sound, and compass. The illustration represents a cithara from a manuscript of the ninth century, formerly in the library of the great monastery of St. Blasius in the Black Forest. When in the year 1768 the monastery was destroyed by fire, this valuable book perished in the flames; fortunately the celebrated abbot Gerbert possessed tracings of the illustrations, which were saved from destruction. He published them, in the year 1774, in his work “De cantu et musica sacra.” Several illustrations in the following pages, it will be seen, have been derived from this interesting source. As the older works on music were generally written in Latin we do not learn from them the popular names of the instruments; the writers merely adopted such Latin names as they thought the most appropriate. Thus, for instance, a very simple stringed instrument of a triangular shape, and a somewhat similar one of a square shape were designated by the name of _psalterium_; and we further give a woodcut of the square kind (p. 86), and of a _cithara_ (above) from the same manuscript. [Illustration] [Illustration] This last instrument is evidently an improvement upon the triangular psalterium, because it has a sort of small sound-board at the top. Scarcely better, with regard to acoustics, appears to have been the instrument designated as _nablum_, which we engrave (p. 87) from a manuscript of the ninth century at Angers. [Illustration] A small psalterium with strings placed over a sound-board was apparently the prototype of the _citole_; a kind of dulcimer which was played with the fingers. The names were not only often vaguely applied by the mediæval writers but they changed also in almost every century. The psalterium, or psalterion (Italian _salterio_, English _psaltery_), of the fourteenth century and later had the trapezium shape of the dulcimer. [Illustration]