On plate 7 I have given a reduction after Westwood of a page from an Irish MS. now in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth. Although it is of comparatively late date (the ninth century), and the writing is the Irish script in its second or wholly minuscule stage, the ornamentation is {86}sufficient to show what Irish work had been and still was. The marvellously elaborate convolutions and interlacements, the dexterous use of colours, the utter absence of gold, and the introduction of grotesque animal figures, are all seen in this plate from the Gospelbook of MacDurnan. (While I write I am reminded of a personal experience which I may be forgiven for setting down in print. When Westwood's great book had come out, I was one day speaking with an English lady of high social position, cultivated and accomplished in many branches of knowledge, to whom after mentioning Westwood I expressed my admiration of what the Irish calligraphers had done in the seventh and eighth centuries, when art was so low in most of the other lands of Europe. The lady listened with patient good-breeding, till I paused, and then said quietly, "I presume that you are yourself an Irishman!" She had evidently mistaken one unfamiliar accent for another, and her remark was a polite criticism upon my credulity or veracity.) Plate 21 (which ought to have been inserted in succession to plate 7) reproduces a miniature from a Breviary written about 1150-60 for Isengrim, Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery at Ottenbeuern in Suabia. The miniature reproduced is a picture of the Ascension, and shows the Saviour standing in an almond-shaped frame, supported and borne aloft by four angels. The Virgin and the Apostles are looking upwards from below, and the picture is enclosed within a square blue border, this being lighted by ornamental fretwork in white. The faces are generally well drawn, and the rapt attention in the eyes of the uplookers is very skilfully depicted. The colours used are blue, green, yellow, red, chesnut, and white. The whole effect is reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon work, and one might easily, at first sight, mistake it for a picture out of an English book of the tenth century. A somewhat similar design of the same subject is found in King Athelstan's Psalter--an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the late ninth century, now {87}in the British Museum; but the Suabian illustration is decidedly inferior in taste and delicacy of treatment. It shows, however, such a kinship that we are inclined to believe in a nearer connexion between German and English art than between German and French Carolingian.