while been despised and neglected by reason of the Normans,[61] and was now known only to a few of the more aged; that so the younger ones, being instructed to read this character, might be more competent to use the documents of their monastery against their adversaries in their old age." The Normans, a warlike but unlettered race, did but little for the first century after the Conquest, to restore the taste for learning which they and the Danes had displaced. While English progress in illumination was thus comparatively paralyzed, in France and Germany new styles, corresponding with those known in architecture as Romanesque, rapidly sprang into popularity. Of the leading decorative features of such styles, as well as of the corresponding alphabets and initial letters, we have endeavoured to give some elegant reductions in plates 4, 5, and 6 of this manual, and in plates 4, 5, and 6 of its technical companion. The illustrations in the former have been taken from the British Museum, "Reg. 1, C. VII.," a folio MS., of bold rather than beautiful execution, but containing throughout many well-designed initial letters and ornaments. The volume comprises the vulgate version of the books of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, and it is believed by Sir Frederick Madden, no doubt the most competent judge in this country, to have been executed about the middle of the 12th century. The materials for the plates in the Technical Manual, Nos. 4, 5, and 6 have been gleaned from a manuscript of rather later date, preserved in the Harleian Collection, Nos. 2803 and 2804. There can be little doubt that the numerous ornaments which decorate this great Bible were the work of German industry, for, independently of the evidences of style offered by the writing and illumination, an entry in the volume informs us that it once belonged to the church of the Blessed Virgin, in one of the suburbs of Worms. All of the ornaments in this series of illustrations show a manifest disposition on the part of their designers to break away from the rigidity of pure convention into a class of foliation, which, if not directly copied from nature, at least recalls the general aspect of her germinating, growing, and, finally, luxuriant forms of vegetation. The combination, with reminiscences of Carlovingian knotted ends to the initial letters, of foliated ornament, during the 12th century, may be frequently found developed, in Germany especially, into a fresh luxuriant, and complete system. The complicated conventionality of foliage shown in many Teutonic manuscripts, and greatly encouraged by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, A.D. 1152 to 1190, was never entirely abandoned by the Germans in their ornament; and at the end of the 13th and early part of the 14th centuries, when France and England were successfully imitating nature, they continued to cling to that peculiarly crabbed style of crinkled foliation, which they reluctantly abandoned only in the 17th century.