Of the various species of national writing which were evolved from Roman calligraphy, and which, from the seventh century onwards, are divided by palæographers into Lombardic and Visigothic, Frankish (Merowingian), and Irish (Hibernian and Anglo-Saxon), the Irish was probably the first to attain a distinct type of its own. There would be {33}inherent probability in the notion that the Irish alphabet and the Irish style of ornament were created in Britain and transferred to Ireland in the fifth century when the English arrived. Professor Westwood seemed to regard the idea with favour but hesitated in giving it full expression. He says "it may be observed that the earliest of the sculptured Christian stones of Wales exhibit the same system of ornamentation, _as well as the same style of writing_, as the Irish MSS. which are, in all probability, of a somewhat more recent date." One will naturally seek to test the value of this observation by examining the writer's Lapidarium Walliæ. In that work, however, no substantiation will be found. There are a couple of instances in which sculptured stones bearing names, which are assigned by Bishop Stubbs to the ninth century, are said by Prof. Westwood to be _perhaps_ of the sixth or seventh; and that is all. On the contrary, the one salient fact observable in the Lapidarium is, that all the inscriptions of the Roman and early post-Roman time are in pure Roman capitals, while the inscriptions upon sculptured stones in minuscules resembling the Irish alphabet, all belong to the period when the Angles and Saxons were in full possession of Irish calligraphic and artistic models--that is, _after_ the seventh century. The Britons of the fifth century, at least all over the Southern half of the island, were a Romanised people as much as the Gauls, and it would be ridiculous to expect Celtic provincial art in the home of Roman culture. They were exterminated or absorbed in the east and middle of the island by the Germanic invaders, and they were harried out of the west by their Cumri kindred from the north, and by pirate Scots from Ireland. The latter part of the fifth century and the whole of the sixth and part of the seventh, formed a period during which the inhabitants of Cambria can have produced little or nothing in the way of letters or art. It was probably not till the beginning of the eighth century that the Cumri began to identify themselves with the {34}ancient Britons, and to gather up the legends and historical traditions of the British remnant as their own. There is a clear testimony that the Cumri and the Britons were closely akin as a race, but not identical, in the fact that names beginning with V in British use down to the fifth century are found to begin with Gu (Gw) in the language of the Welsh. Guend and Vend were of course two phases of an old Celtic word, but the former is necessarily the older. Consequently the people who have used