sacred persons and subjects, was firmly established in the capital,
and those "made without hands" were propagated in the camps and cities
of the Eastern empire by monkish artists, whose flat delineations were
in the last degeneracy of taste.

In the eighth century, Leo the Isaurian ascended the throne of the
East, and for a time the public or private worship of images was
proscribed, but the edict was vigorously and successfully resisted by
the Latins of the Western church. Charlemagne, whose literary tastes
are attested by his encouragement of the learned, by the foundation of
schools, and by his patronage of the arts of music and painting, gave
a great impulse to the practice of illumination: and the Benedictines,
whose influence extended throughout Europe, assigned an eminent
rank among monastic virtues to the guardianship and reproduction of
valuable manuscripts. In each Benedictine monastery a chamber was set
apart for this sacred purpose, and Charlemagne assigned to Alcuin,
a member of their order, the important office of preparing a perfect
copy of the Scriptures.

The process of laving on and burnishing gold and silver appears
to have been familiar to oriental nations from a period of remote
antiquity, and the Greeks are supposed to have acquired from them the
art of thus ornamenting manuscripts, which they in turn communicated
to the Latins. Their most precious manuscripts were written in gold
or silver letters, on the finest semi-transparent vellum, stained of a
beautiful violet color (the imperial purple), and these were executed
only for crowned heads. One of the most ancient existing specimens of
this mode of caligraphy in the fourth century, the _Codex Argenteus_
of Ulphilas, the inventor of the Visigothic alphabet, was discovered
in the library of Wolfenbüttel, and is now at Upsal, Sweden. This