How deeply must all lovers of illumination regret the infinite destruction of books that has prevailed in all ages! Of all this "librorum copiam," how few survive. Even in the days of Alfred the Great, the Danes had destroyed the majority of them; for, as that great royal Bibliomaniac exclaims, in his preface to the "Pastoral of Gregory,"--"I saw, before _all_ were spoiled and burnt, how the churches throughout Britain were filled with treasures and books." I now leave our own country for a while, and return to the general continent of Europe; having, I trust, satisfactorily established the individuality of those three great styles of illumination, from the fusion of which the Romanesque, and ultimately the Mediæval, system sprang,--viz., the Roman, or pictorial; the Greek, or golden; and the Hiberno-Saxon, or intricate. The commencement of that fusion has been traced in the later Anglo-Saxon work, and it now remains to observe the circumstances under which a similar, and even more marked, amalgamation took place on the continent, under the auspices of Charlemagne, the greatest patron of the art who ever lived. Much has been assumed by early Palæographers, and even some recent ones, with respect to the influence exercised by the Lombard MSS. executed between the establishment of the Lombard kingdom in the year 568, and its absorption A.D. 774, in the empire of Charlemagne, on the class of illumination introduced under his auspices; but the specimens which have descended to these days exhibit such an entire decrepitude of style, as to justify the belief that, with the exception of a peculiar broken-backed letter, known as "Lombard brisé," the Lombards themselves contributed little or nothing to the results which attended the efforts made by that great sovereign to raise the art of book-decoration in his day to its highest pitch. It was mainly by the aid, and through the direct instrumentality, of the learned Anglo-Saxon, Alcuin, that Charlemagne carried out his laudable design. This industrious ecclesiastic, who was born in the year 735, received his education under Egbert and Elbert, successive archbishops of the see of York,--having been appointed at an early age "custodian" to the library collected by the former. On the death of Elbert, he was sent to Rome to receive the pallium of investiture for the new archbishop Enbalde. On his journey home, in 780, he passed through Parma, where Charlemagne happened to be at the time. The consequence of their meeting in that city was, that Alcuin received and accepted an invitation to take up his residence at the court of the Frankish sovereign. During four-and-twenty years, until his death, indeed, in 804, he retained the affection and respect of his royal patron, and occupied himself in incessant labour for the advancement of learning, and the multiplication of pure texts of the Holy Scriptures and other good books. Several of Alcuin's