The Septuagint must remain the true Bible of Christendom until the Hebrew text of the præ-Christian ages is discovered. Next to it in importance is the Syriac Bible, and next to that, the Latin Vulgate. All three indicate the prior existence of a Hebrew original; but to obtain a critically exact knowledge of what that original was at the time of Alexander the Great, one must resort to the Septuagint; at the time of Christ, to the Syriac; and at the time of the Emperor Julian, to the Vulgate. The Hebrew text, as we now have it, underwent so many changes and corruptions during the first few centuries of the growth of Christianity as a younger rival to Judaism, that even the oldest Hebrew MSS. are precluded by their comparative modernity from claiming equal importance with the three versions referred to. The multiplication of copies of the Syriac Scriptures, between the first century after Christ and the seventh, must have been very great; that of the Greek Bible and Testament, from the first to the fourteenth century, still greater; and that of the Latin Vulgate, from the fifth to the fifteenth, enormous. The early missionaries of the Christian Church were Hellenised Syrians or Egyptians, and they stamped the art of their native countries upon the new Biblical literature in every country except Italy. Italy was the exception, simply because it was the centre of political power and of Græco-Roman culture, and thus too learned and too fastidious to accept a new popular religion or an inferior type of ornamental art. But all the external provinces of the Empire underwent the influence of the enthusiastic proselytizers, and even Byzantium succumbed to it after the Empire of the West had been extinguished. The types of ornament created for the embellishment of Bibles were Egyptian in {25}design and colouring; and this is the reason why the pictures in all the early examples of book-illustration in the West are supposed to have a Byzantine aspect; the fact being that while classical art faded away almost with paganism in Italy and Hellas, the Oriental substitute, which reigned from Asia Minor to Ireland, was preserved in Byzantium till the downfall of the Greek empire. A few belated specimens of degenerate classical ornament are found to represent the ages between Constantine and Charles the Great; but in general terms it may be said that Roman book-illustration died out in the fourth century. It came to life again, but in utter metamorphosis, in the decorated Irish books of the sixth-seventh century, which were really the first examples of the mediæval art of illumination.