_Gw_ from the fifth to the nineteenth century cannot be the same as those who had already reached the _V_-stage in the first century. They were close relatives undoubtedly, but had little in common beyond their racial affinity and the original homogeneity of their speech. It may be surmised that the Briton found no more kindness in his Cumric stepbrother, or his Irish cousin, than in the fierce strangers who called him a Welshman (because they found him talking Welsh, _i.e._ Latin). Bede, in spite of his Romanist tendency, and his Romanist aversion to the practice of the Celtic church with regard to the Paschal festival and the tonsure, gives clear evidence that in the middle of the seventh century "many Englishmen of the noble and the meaner sort" resorted to Ireland, and dwelt there for the purpose either of study or of leading a religious life (divinæ lectionis vel continentioris vitæ gratiâ), and states that "the Scots received them all most willingly, giving them their daily food without charge, _also books for reading_, and gratuitous instruction." The Angles were apt pupils. They learned to write and ornament books of their own in the Irish manner, and they had Irish monks in their new monasteries who fostered the art. By the close of the seventh century, there were expert penmen among the Anglian monks, and during the eighth century, although the very close adherence to Irish models is the feature of most of the ornamental manuscripts, they began to strike out a new and characteristic line of their own in which they soon surpassed their masters. This was in {35}figure-drawing, in miniatures painted with a mastery of design which was altogether unknown to the Irish. The heads or figures which appeared in Irish illuminations were merely accessory and subordinate to the scheme of decoration, utterly contemptible as delineations of human form. In the Anglo-Saxon miniatures of the period which began--say about 750 and continued to the eleventh century, there is a distinct national school, in which the over-anxious treatment of draperies and the striking addiction to light green pigment, are prominent characteristics. The style gives a sort of general impression that it had been formed upon a Byzantine model, but the probability is that the later classical survival in Italy in the seventh century had helped to form the Anglo-Saxon taste as well as the taste of the Carolingian school. A similar, but ruder, expression of the same Anglo-Saxon method of illustration appeared in German work of the tenth and eleventh centuries; and as this had its parentage in the French Carolingian art of the ninth century, we may suspect that the tendency which brought that art to its perfection in the time of Charles the Bald, had begun in Gaul before the time of Charles the Great, that is, earlier than the usual date of its sudden genesis. This conjecture would make the production of books illustrated with miniatures synchronise in France and England, and thus