for its beauty, which is nevertheless great, but for painstaking.
Knowing but one style of making a book beautiful,
they lavished much time and loving care to achieve their
end. The detail is extraordinarily minute and complicated.
"I have counted," writes Professor Westwood, "[with
a magnifying glass] in a small space scarcely three-quarters
of an inch in length by less than half an inch in width, in
the Book of Armagh, no less than 158 interlacements of a
slender ribbon pattern formed of white lines edged with
black ones." But, this intricacy notwithstanding, the designs
as a whole are usually bold and effective. In the best kind
of Irish illumination gold and silver are not used, but the
colours are varied and brilliant, and are employed with
taste and discretion; while the occasional staining of a leaf
of vellum with a fine purple sometimes adds beauty and
much distinction to an excellent design.

Of intricate geometrical ornament and grotesque figures,
the illumination representing the symbols of the Four
Evangelists (fo. 290) of the Book of Kells is perhaps the
best example. Of divergent spirals and interlaced ribbon
work the frontispiece of St. Jerome's Epistle in the Book of
Durrow affords notable examples. Two of the peculiar
features of Irish decoration--the rows of red dots round a
design and the dragon's head--appear in the earliest, or
nearly the earliest, Irish manuscript extant, namely, the
Cathach Psalter, now in the Museum of the Royal Irish
Academy. Whether the essential and peculiar features of
this ornamentation are purely indigenous, as Professor
Westwood contends, or whether they are of Gallo-Roman