Books in Irish or Saxon-Irish writing are found all over the continent. As they were written in monasteries founded by Irish missionaries during the seventh and eighth centuries, they only indicate that a succession of Irish or of Saxon monks continued to make their way for a considerable period to France, Germany, and Italy. The writing can hardly be said to have left any traces in the various national hands of those countries, but the Irish house at Bobbio probably transmitted the use of the interlaced ornamentation which revived in Italy several centuries later. Most of the motifs of decoration in the illuminated Carolingian, Visigothic, and Lombardic MS. were derived from the Irish methods of ornamentation introduced through monastic houses and schools established by Irish monks on the continent. French writers deny their indebtedness to foreigners for it, since, as they say, the pattern was always at hand in the tessellated and mosaic pavements of Gallo-Roman architecture. But there is something of unnecessary vanity in the denial. The Irish MSS. of the seventh century are the first in Europe which contain decorative initials of the kind. This fact is indisputable, and is not affected by the question of original derivation, which in my opinion is to be sought for in the east among those Hellenised Syrians and Egyptians who were the propagators of Christian art as well as Christian religion in the west. _Merowingian, Lombardic, Visigothic_ These names, applied to varying styles of writing, are without historical exactness. Roughly speaking, the first {39}means the debased Roman used in Gaul and Western Germany from the sixth to the eighth century, the second was the script of the larger part of Italy (but chiefly the east and the south) between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, the third was the national hand of Spain and Languedoc during the eighth to the twelfth century. The names are based upon erroneous historical assumptions. The Frankish kings, supposed to be descended from Merowig, carried with them across the Rhine no graphic system whatever. They found in Gaul the identical styles of writing which were used in Italy, and such of their people as gave up the trade of warriors to assume that of clerics and councillors, were obliged to learn the arts of the Gauls. The circumstances under which the new kingdom was established as a permanent institution, were not such as to make the Franks a nation of penmen; and the influence of their bad taste in calligraphy could hardly have been felt till the beginning of the seventh century. Their Gallic underlings continued to write as before, but in the absence of enlightened patronage, the schools of art no longer produced good work, except in the monasteries of the Provincia Romana, where less deterioration took place than elsewhere. The Frankish monarchy was so widely extended throughout the territories stretching from the Loire to the Main, and along the whole course of the