The Anglo-Celtic Church is real enough, from the Synod of Verulam and its condemnation of Pelagius in 429 with the help of the bishops of Lyons. There is no doubt about S. Patrick's being a real person, or that his work was real work, ending 465 A.D.; nor yet as to S. Columba at Iona before 563, nor of S. Columban and S. Gall in the Rhætian Alps, nor of S. Aidan's mission to Oswald of Northumbria, nor of the foundation of Lindisfarne in 635, nor of the final submission to Rome at the Synod of Whitby in 664.

The first characteristic of Irish ornament which the student must infallibly notice is the plaited work. It is not peculiar to the West, as Westwood gives a specimen of it from an Arabic MS. in Palæographia Sacra, and the guilloche border exemplifies it. It is to be seen in Professor Ruskin's Byzantine capitals in vol. i. of the Stones of Venice, and may even be, as he says, in its Eastern form a remembrance of the chequer work and braided work of the Temple of Solomon.

The wonderful development of the almost universal taste for interlaced pattern is common to the Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS. The pure Irish work is always distinguishable from the English, however, by the entire sacrifice of every consideration, save colour, to complexity of pattern; and also by the extraordinary skill and minute beauty of its spiral lines, which are almost untraceable to the outer world, though Professor Westwood has had the incalculable energy and patience to copy some of the most elaborate. A great gift of colour is perceptible in the strange miniatures of the Book of Kells, where Scriptural subject is attempted not without power or beauty, but with a quaintness which marks the work of an isolated Church which owed Rome nothing, and to which Greece or Syria had taught nothing but the Faith. The study of natural beauty, as a man may see it in leaves and flowers and sunset and sunrise, is not found in these MSS., and their art dies away in complexity. The pious zeal for the text remained, but He who gave the text for knowledge gave also the Book of Nature for ornament. The Irish monk would not read in the latter, and his art begins in rudeness and ends in madness of involved lines; he still desires to represent the facts and symbolism of the Church, but he has forgotten in his scriptorium what any man or thing is really like. The Crucifixion at the beginning of the Psalter

t. vii. p. 635. Καὶ γὰρ αἱ Βρεττανικοὶ νῆσοι, αἱ τῆς θαλάττης ἐκτὸς κείμεναι ταύτης, καὶ ἐν αὐτῷ οὖσαι τῷ Ωκεανῷ, τῆς δυνάμεως τ. ῥήματος ᾔσθοντο· καὶ γὰρ κάκει ἐκκλησίαι, κ. θυσιαστήρια πεπήγασιν. Tertullian adv. Judæos, c. vii., Britannorum inaccessa Romanis loca, Christo vero subdita, c. A.D. 200.

of S. John's College, Cambridge, with its attendant angels, or it may be sun and moon, is an interesting and lamentable example of the decay of the intellectual energies of a Church to which such great work had been committed, and which had done it so faithfully. However, the gift of colour often redeems much, as in the Book of Kells, where the deep blues, purples, and greens are exquisite, as also the azure and green in the MS. of Brith MacDurnan. As far as I know, it is best paralleled in Ravenna mosaics; and this consideration is important, as it confirms the idea of Professor Westwood that much knowledge of ornament was obtained for the North by English and Irish pilgrims or preachers, who studied the colour of the mosaics, then in their first splendour, and tried, not in vain, to reproduce the play of tesselation in the sacred writing which so delighted their souls. Such copying, or rather imitation, would account for the Byzantine appearance of so many of these works, and perhaps for the attachment to dots and zigzags; except that the Northern students of Ravennese form seem to have missed the severe, though not incorrect, lines of drapery, and neglected the conventional reference to nature, which still preserved the life of the Eastern schools,1

At periods when art is hanging between life and death it is not easy to distinguish the archaic from the barbarous; to say which style will grow out of its obvious errors, and which will never arrive at doing anything right. Good Byzantine work is archaic, for it is the second childhood of Old Greece, and the nurse, if not the infancy, of the Gothic Renaissance, or return to Old Greek. But for certain Irish and English ribbon and dot ornament, I fear there is no word for it but barbarous. The interlaced work, variously derived from Gothic hurdles, British wicker-work,2 Runic knots, Saxon leg-bandages, &c., has already been spoken of as found in architecture. It is certainly more rare in Eastern art 3 (there is none, for example, in the Syrian MS. of Rabula, though it contains chevrons, lozenges, zigzags, flowers, fruits, and

1 Byzantine Olive,' Stones of Venice, vol. iii. p. 179.

2 I have Professor Westwood's authority for the following facts :-Mr. French, of Liverpool, celebrated for his antiquarian knowledge, orders a wicker cross to be made in Ireland, forwarding a pattern. It comes home admirably executed, with the exception that a ring has been added round the arms, forming the perfect Runic cross. It was impossible, the workman said, to fasten them securely without using it. What a light this throws on the origin of ornament, interlaced and other. It is only the great constructive rule of architecture over again.

3 See Westwood, p. 8, Arabic MSS.

birds).1 In Northern miniature and writing it is universal, and in Irish and English work passes into the wildest intricacy of spirals and every variety of ribboned and spotty ornament, with a grotesque use of lacertine or ophidian forms everywhere, which frequently border on the diabolical. In fact, we here come in contact with a wild and morbid grotesque, the earliest forms, perhaps, of the Northern love of jest and feverish play of invention, and perhaps a century older than the Lombard extravagances of S. Michele of Pavia.2 The difference is that the South Scandinavian work (for such is the Lombardic) was based on observation of nature, however excited and irrational; and the Irish was that of incurious ascetics, who saw no good in nature. It seems to have given considerable offence to the Benedictine authors of the Nouv. Traité de Diplomatique (ii. 122), as they complain with some acrimony of the 'imaginations atroces et mélancoliques' of the derivative Anglo-Saxon MSS., which they charitably attribute to climate. Their remarks are not unfounded; but this kind of work may have been occasioned by echoes or reflexions of contest with ophidian and Gnostic symbolism, as we have heard the interlaced work traced, not without probability, to the wicker of the great Druidical idols. Still this form of grotesque points onward to the future Gothic taste for oddity and putting right heads on wrong shoulders. A kind of awed and half-terrified spirit of jesting may possibly be detected even in Greek representations of the serpent, as in the extraordinary quadruped-snake of Eden in a seventh- or eighth-century MS. in the Vatican. He stood for evil; and to monks of that time all nature may have seemed like a masque or mystery of evil.

The middle of the ninth century is the period assigned by Professor Westwood for the evident influence of artists of the schools of Charlemagne on the productions of English scriptoria. For though many Frankish schools were presided over by Alcuin and other learned Englishmen, yet both they and the Franks were led, by more frequent intercourse with Rome, to a higher appreciation of the relics of classical art; and thus followed the decay of the old ingenuities of unmeaning pattern. The British Church had much to receive in exchange for her liberty.

'Increased communication with Rome,' says Professor Westwood, 'led to the adoption of a more realistic treatment of the human figure, ! See, however, Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ; Pal. Sac., ' Arabic Gospels,' No. 8.

2 See Stones of Venice, vol. i. app. 8, 'The Northern Energy.

as well as to a more general adoption of foliage as an element of ornamental design. Indeed, after the ninth or first half of the tenth century I have been unable to find any Anglo-Saxon MS. executed in the Lindisfarne or Irish style, although, as we have seen, it remained for several centuries longer in use in Ireland, considerably modified, however, in its ornamental details.'

These two points of improvement in Anglo-Saxon (or English) work mark the Professor's agreement with what we have been contending for on the purely pictorial side-the evidence of renewed study of nature in French and English work, learnt from the relics of Græco-Roman art. It was part of the firstfruits of the new life of Christian civilisation north of the Alps, and existed as it could, only in religious hands. In Lombardy the noble and beautiful life of the great cities of Milan, Pisa, and Florence, with the great genius of the population, soon produced far higher results. Emerging from heavy trials, and preparing for yet more, Christianity was now monastic; but the Church bore her arts with her, in their ascetic form of caligraphy and miniature, whithersoever she fled into the wilderness. She issues from Ireland, and from Rome, to possess the English race for ever. From Ireland her fairly written MSS. testify to the peace that they had, even in days of general massacre, who loved the laws of God; to the sacredness of the word, and the delight of the caligrapher in it; and his patterns show in their intricate beauty and gift of colour the monk's pleasant simplicity and contented labour, without much thought, and happy for a time in his skill only. From the seventh to the tenth century Rome is prostrate, except for the alliance of the new Empire; and the stream of Christian teaching, verbal and pictorial, bears its Celtic missionaries over the Continent, bearing help to Latin Christianity. Rome is for a time reformed by Gregory the Great, and then allied with Pepin and Charlemagne; and the relics of her art and learning are eagerly embraced by Lombards, Franks, and English, so that the Anglo-Saxon caligraphists begin to take lessons in their turn of Greece and Rome, and to prefer miniature to mere pattern, and emulate (or produce) the grand Carolingian MSS. In these the study of nature is a leading feature, a more important one than their Imperial splendour, or than their Merovingian and Visigothic grotesqueness; and with the study of nature the Gothic copyists now combined the faithful emulation of classical models, such as they knew. Their willingness to learn of the past was equal, but some had better models than others. There is great difference in the genius, the opportunities,

and the success of Niccola Pisano, Count Vivien, Rabula the Syrian monk, or the writer of the Augustinian or of Athelstan's Psalter, who has not even a name; but the artistic excellence of their work is due to the same principles of study; nor in any of these cases could it have existed but for the operation of the Faith which alone made study possible to them.

ART. IX. THE LIFE OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCE CONSORT.

The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort. By THEODORE MARTIN. Vol. III. (London, 1877.)

THE labours of Mr. Martin on the life of the Prince Consort have been marked by conscientious diligence not less noteworthy than his talent and his equitable temper. With these qualifications, and with the free access to the innermost centres of confidential information, which has been so graciously accorded to him by the Sovereign, he has in his two former volumes presented to us a personal portraiture of the Prince Consort so complete that it scarcely allows the addition of a touch. The biographer, as he proceeds along the course of the revolving years, can indeed lengthen the catalogue of his wise and good actions, and can show how time, as it gives new force, depth, and dignity to the human countenance, even into a prolonged old age, so also imparts a riper mellowness, and a more compact solidity, to mental faculty and work.

Monumental commemoration, which reminds man of his weakness even more than of his strength, and which has been carried farther perhaps in the case of the Prince Consort than of any other distinguished personage, has something in it that jars when it goes beyond the modesty of custom. Yet every statue and memorial of the Prince may in some sense be considered as a sermon made visible. He is one of the few, the very few, characters on the active stage of modern life, in whom the idea of duty seems to be actually personified, and to walk abroad in the costumes of State. It is good for us to be taken back, again and again, to see the spectacle, and so to learn its lessons. After making every allowance for a