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 Wolfenbuettel, and is now at Upsal, Sweden. This
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 Carlovin