Bibles and liturgical books in the twelfth century are remarkable for their large size and the quantity of decoration with which they were produced. In Germany, the method of ornament still repeats the Anglo-Saxon type derived from Carolingian work, and the handwriting is still Carolingian, but the letters lean forward instead of being upright, their forms are narrowed and chiselled off by short sharp terminal strokes that give an appearance of angularity. (An example of the art is given on plate 21.) In Spain, the beautiful round "Visigothic" letters are still retained, with large initials of interlaced Celtic pattern, and the illustrative pictures (if there are any) have the same style as had been developed some centuries earlier in Aquitaine. The German and the Spanish have a sort of resemblance by reason of their common origin, but more especially because of the striking combination of green and yellow in the paintings, the note of yellow apparently being strongest in the latter, and of green in the former. The use of green tints predominates likewise in English work of the eighth-twelfth centuries, but became much more sparing under the influence of the French school which, after the eleventh century, began to avoid indulgence in that colour. It never lost its favourite place in German art, and the MSS. of Holland and Flanders only dropped it when they began to assimilate French methods in the fourteenth century. England in the twelfth century {62}produced much finer work than the French. In fact the English school of that century was the parent of nearly all the art of the following century. Both in calligraphy and in pictorial designs, it forestalled the work done in the whole of Western Europe between 1200 and 1300, which has rendered the thirteenth century the most noteworthy in the history of illustrated MSS. The mode and style of drawing, unfinished by illumination, which were practised in England towards the close of the thirteenth century, may be examined in plate 10. Italian work of the same time is shown in plate 11 to have been much more barbaric and unskilful. The difference between English twelfth-century work and that of Europe in the thirteenth century consisted in the large and ample freedom of hand which marks the former and the delicate minuteness which characterises alike the writing and the miniatures of the latter. As for style and quality of work, there is scarcely any difference between them. This new English school, so admirable in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had grown up over the decline of the Anglo-Saxon phase, which, fine as it was, had still somewhat of a barbaric air about it. The conquest of the Saxon monarchy by a Duke of Normandy in the eleventh century, and the succession in the twelfth of a Count of Anjou who united under his sceptre England, Normandy, and Aquitaine, made this country the centre of French art and literature for a considerable period. Hence the almost complete identity of