It appears certain that the most ancient European instruments known to us were in form and construction more like the Asiatic than was the case with later ones. Before a nation has attained to a fairly high degree of civilisation its progress in the cultivation of music, as an art, is very slow indeed. The instruments found at the present day in Asia are scarcely superior to those which were in use among oriental nations about three thousand years ago. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that no material improvement is perceptible in the construction of the instruments of European countries during the lapse of nearly a thousand years. True, evidences to be relied on referring to the first five or six centuries of the Christian era are but scanty; although indications are not wanting which may help the reflecting musician. 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. [Illustration: FIG. 23.――CITHARA. From a 9th century MS. formerly in the monastery of St. Blasius in the Black Forest.] _Cithara_ was a name applied to several stringed instruments greatly varying in form, power of sound, and compass. The illustration (Fig. 23) 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.” 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 (Fig. 24), were designated by the name of _psalterium_. [Illustration: FIG. 24.――PSALTERIUM. From a MS. of the 9th century, formerly in the monastery of St. Blasius in the Black Forest.]