After repeated attacks on the Roman empire in the third century, and repeated defeats, the Goths had extended their seats southwards, and were resident, in a partly Christianised state, in the lands north and south of the Danube. Wulfila, or Ulfila, a Goth, said to have been born in Cappadocia, a man of great ability, who was able to preach in Gothic, in Greek, and in Latin, thought the time had come to Christianise his countrymen completely. For that purpose he translated the Bible into the Gothic language, and created an uncial alphabet, derived partly from Greek, partly from Latin, and partly from Runic. Of his twenty-seven letters, two are merely numerals. In the twenty-five that were used for writing, the _c_ (g), _d_, _l_, _p_, and _ch_ have their Greek uncial shapes, the _a_, _b_, _e_, _f_, _h_, _i_, _k_, _m_, _n_, _r_, _s_, _t_, and _z_ may be called Latin uncials; the _q_ resembles our capital _u_, but is plainly an adaptation of the Greek _koppa_, the _th_ seems to be modified from the Greek _ph_, but may have easily been the Greek _th_; a Roman G is inserted in the alphabet in the place of the Greek _Ksi_, and seems to have been used as _gh_ or _Y_ consonant; a Greek Y is used for the Runic angular P which represented the Teutonic _w_; an o with a dot in the centre stood for _hw_; and the vowels O and U appear as [Symbol: 8 without bottom half-loop] and [Symbol: inverted U]. The Gothic _th_, _hw_, _w_, _o_, {32}and _u_ are found in the Runic alphabet, from which Ulfila must have borrowed them. So far as it was possible to him he avoided the letters of his pagan ancestors, but for certain sounds existing in Gothic, and not in Greek or Latin, he was compelled to fall back upon the Runes. Just in a similar way, the Anglo-Saxons two hundred years later, when adopting the Irish-Roman alphabet, were obliged to add the necessary _th_ and _w_ from the same Runic source. The Gothic letters of Ulfila were used for about two centuries by the so-called Ostrogoths, all the extant manuscripts of the Gothic Bible having been written in Italy in the sixth century, the famous Silver Gospels of Stockholm included. Of the Visigoths who had preceded the Ostrogoths in Italy, but gone onward thence to fix their rule in Southern Gaul and Spain, we have nothing to show that they ever made use of the Ulphilan alphabet. Their coins of the sixth and seventh centuries bear inscriptions in debased Roman capitals; and the so-called Visigothic writing in manuscripts of the eighth to the twelfth centuries is simply Spanish-Roman. The use, in modern times, of the word Gothic to indicate special forms of writing and architecture is very absurd, but the phrase has become convenient. In so far as writing is concerned, we may continue to use the word gothic (with a small g) to denote the angular "black letter" of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. _Irish and British writing_