ery much at fault.

I had begun a geographical survey of the field, taking countries as the
units, and had written upon Italy and Spain, and attempted France. But I
found that when the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were reached my
tract was becoming a disquisition upon palaeography, art, and learning,
and, of course, was failing to do justice either to any one of them or
to what it had promised in its title. I now think that a chronological
survey will be more practicable, and that it will be best to take first
the subject of book-production, looking at each country in turn in a
single period, instead of following the course taken by each, from the
sixth century to the fifteenth.

_Sixth and Seventh Centuries._--Italy, France, and Spain are the main
centres. Ireland is active in learning, and in the second half of the
seventh century England, under Archbishop Theodore and Abbot Hadrian,
produces schools which rival the Irish, and, in the person of Bede, has
the greatest scholar of the time. Some of the great Irish monasteries,
such as Bobbio, Luxeuil, St. Gall, are founded on the Continent.

Books are produced in considerable numbers in Italy, France, Spain; and
from Italy they are exported, especially by English pilgrims, such as
Benedict Biscop. The Gospel harmony written in 546 by or for Bishop
Victor of Capua comes to England, and goes abroad again, with St.
Boniface, perhaps, and now rests at Fulda, where also his body lies. A
copy of St. Jerome on Ecclesiastes, written in Italy in the sixth or
seventh century, has in it the Anglo-Saxon inscription, "The book of
Cuthsuuitha the Abbess." The only Abbess Cuthsuuitha we know of presided
over a nunnery in or near Worcester about 690-700. Her book travelled to
Germany with some British or English missionary, and is at Wuerzburg.
Wuerzburg is an Irish foundation; its apostle and patron, St. Kilian, is
said to have been assassinated in 689. From Italy, too, came (most
likely) the illustrated Gospels now at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
(286), which belonged once to Christchurch, Canterbury; and the
beautiful little copy of St. John's Gospel at Stonyhurst College, which
was found in the coffin of St. Cuthbert (d. 687) when it was opened in
1104. And St. Gall must have acquired its ancient Virgil from Italy
also--when, we do not know.

Spain kept her books very much to herself, one would guess, judging from
the very few Spanish MSS. of this age which are to be