fine MS. is written in letters of gold and silver on a purple ground;
and the fragments of a Greek MS. of the Eusebian Canons of the sixth
century, preserved in the British Museum, is perhaps a unique example
of a MS. in which both sides of the leaves are illuminated upon a
golden ground. Mr. Owen Jones' illustrations commence with a page
from the celebrated Durham book, or _Gospels of St. Cuthbert_, in
the Hiberno-Saxon style of the seventh century, which was borrowed
originally from the Romans, and afterward diffused throughout Europe
by the itinerant-Saxon Benedictines. This style is formed by an
ingenious disposition of interweaving threads or ribbons of different
colors, varied by the introduction of extremely attenuated lizard-like
reptiles, birds, and other animals. The initial letters are of
gigantic size, and of extreme intricacy, and are generally surrounded
with rows of minute red dots.

The Coronation Oath Book of the Anglo-Saxon kings is a curious
specimen of the rude state of art in the ninth century. The Lombard
and the Carlovingian styles, of which latter the Psalter of Charles
the Bold, is a fine specimen, prevailed on the continent during the
eighth and ninth centuries. Toward the end of the tenth century,
the Anglo-Saxon school, under the patronage of Bishop Ethelwold,
at Winchester, assumed a new and distinct character, which was not
surpassed by any works executed at the same period. This style, with
its bars of gold, forming complete frames to the text, when enriched
with interweaving foliage of the acanthus and the ivy, became the
basis of the latter and more florid school of illumination, which
attained its highest perfection in the twelfth century, and of which
the Arnstein Bible is an example. This Bible belonged to the Monks
of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, of Arnstein, and the value which was
attached to it may be inferred from the following quaint and mild