Some of the remarks in the preceding section will be found in strong disagreement with the authority of Professor {37}Westwood, whose work on the Anglo-Saxon and Irish miniatures is such a splendid testimony to his zeal and ability. His conjectural dates are, however, frequently misleading. An instance is that of the so-called Bible of St. Gregory, figured on his plates 14, 15. In the text he says that Sir Frederick Madden had declared the MS. to be "unquestionably of the eighth century," but he prefers to call it of the seventh, in agreement with Casley and Astle (who thought so in the last century!). He ought to have accepted the opinion of a recognised master in palæography like Sir Frederick, so far as the writing is concerned, in preference to that of two men living at a time before the science had attained anything like exactness in England. He ought also to have seen or felt, while making his elaborate facsimile, that the nearest parallel to the style of illumination of his "first page of Luke" is to be found in Carolingian work executed about 800; and that no great space of time could separate the two examples. The English work was probably the earlier, but it can hardly have been accomplished before 770. The purely Irish patterns in the columns supporting the arch, with the excellent picture of St. Luke that surmounts it, prove by their combination that the work is Anglo-Saxon of its second and finer period, that is after the phase in which it was merely and wholly imitative of the Irish. With these considerations in view, and a remembrance of Bede's words quoted above in relation to Anglian education in Ireland about A.D. 650, the assignment of the Bible of St. Gregory to the seventh century is a pure absurdity.--Again, Westwood's facsimile from the Golden Gospels of Stockholm, bears the attribution "Sixth Century? Ninth Century?" while its position in the book, as the first plate, tends to show that Professor Westwood leaned to the earlier date. Yet the book is unquestionably not Irish; its artistic illustration is a singularly fine development of Anglo-Saxon art--think of Anglo-Saxon art and chrysography in the sixth century! The writing cannot be {38}mistaken for Roman uncials of the sixth century; it is plainly in Carolingian uncials of the latter half of the eighth. The book seems to have been illustrated by an Anglian hand, and written by a Frankish one,--probably on the continent rather than in England.