obviate the difficulty of supposing that the Anglo-Saxons invented the art and carried it to perfection within a century of their learning how to write. It is sufficient glory for them to have converted the artistic movement of the time into a national school of painting unmistakable with any other, at a time when the calligraphical schools of central and Southern France, under an enlightened Frankish emperor, and with far superior opportunities, were labouring for a Gallo-Roman renaissance. {36}_Origin of Mediæval Illumination_ Books in the classical period had of course been ornamented with illustrations, but the illumination of books (in the mediæval sense) did not originate with the Græco-Roman calligraphers of the Empire. We cannot suppose that it sprang into life in Ireland, but certainly its first European manifestation was in Irish MSS., and the art had not been received by the Irish from any of the European nations. The only alternative is, however, far fetched, that Christian missionaries from the East (or with Eastern training) had preceded St. Patrick and brought with them those characteristics of Syro-Egyptian art which are traceable alike in Irish and in Byzantine work. The documentary period of writing in Ireland is of course later than the actual practice of the art in that country, but it is earlier than amongst any other of the unromanised barbarians. Adamnan, writing about A.D. 670, relates the life of St. Columba (dead in 598) and describes the writing materials which that saint had used in his scriptorium in the island of Hy. As he had learned to write in Ireland and had begun his priestly career there before 540, we may place the historically ascertainable use of writing in Ireland as beginning with the early years of the sixth century. Irish monks carried the art to Britain, to Gaul, to Germany; and those elaborate and intricate patterns to which the French give the names of "lettres perlées, lettres brodées, spirales, noeuds, et entrelacs, initiales ophiomorphiques, ichthyomorphiques," &c., and which they claim as indigenous productions of Carolingian France in the early part of the ninth century--were fruits of the teaching of Irish missionaries, in the houses which they founded in Britain and all over the continent in the seventh century.