Between the ninth century and the sixteenth, the multiplication of MSS. in Europe was very great, but comparatively few of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh have been preserved. Beautiful examples of blended writing and decoration were produced in England in the ninth century by Anglian and Irish calligraphers in the north, and by Saxon writers in the south. In York and Durham, and Lindisfarne, the style and the motifs of ornament were still thoroughly Irish; in the south, although the late Roman had conquered the Celtic, their collision had produced a singularly fine type of illumination, reminiscent of Byzantine work, but much more free and natural. That art had already beautified the Carolingian French school; in the Carolingian German its influence appears in a weaker and ruder form. When with the tenth century France and Germany emerged as two distinct nations from the chaos of the Frankish empire, their modes of book-decoration began to diverge. The rudeness of an earlier time remains, with a good deal of spirit, in the illustrative designs produced in Germany; the beauty of French work began to decay, while the English was at its best. Winchester, Canterbury, and Glastonbury were the real centres of English art at the middle of the tenth century; the Norsemen having destroyed the Anglo-Irish monasteries in the north. This south English school is considered to have benefited materially by the technical superiority of French methods. What the north English schools of York and Lindisfarne had given to Tours in the eighth century, came back to Winchester at the end of the ninth, refined and embellished. Thus the supremacy of English art was assured at a time when French art was declining. The great variety, however, in all countries, of work done by different men, renders it difficult to draw general deductions. The calligraphic decoration of "Visigothic" and "Lombardic" manuscripts during the ninth, {60}tenth, and eleventh centuries is visibly Celtic in origin and style. Their pictorial illustration is sometimes very striking, and indicates the existence of several central schools of design in Europe. The English, the French, the German, the Spanish, and the Italian, had all certain qualities in common, but the first two were most nearly akin. The other three schools produced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries books containing pictures, in which the composition is more remarkable than the drawing, and the painting is full of barbaric contrasts of colour. At all times, fine work was to be found in Italy, but only in isolated examples, and Italy as a whole underwent the same barbarisation as the other countries. From that stage the English and the French were the first to emerge. They can hardly be said to have _revived_ any former state of art in connexion with books. It was with them a real creation. The frequent reference to Byzantium as having supplied the models for European illuminated work is misleading.