These extracts show what strict attention the ancient Irish in Pagan times paid to the art of diversifying and improving colors. Hence at the time of St. Columba, it is in no way surprising that natives of ancient Eire were then superior to any other people in their knowledge of combining colors, of ornamenting, of writing and painting.

A striking instance of the style of dress, and of the color of the cloak worn by kings and queens, is given in the Irish Epic of the early part of the first century.The Taim bo Cuai'gne.

Queen Melb is described as: "A beautiful pale, longfaced woman, with long, flowing, yellow hair, a crimson cloak, fastened with a brooch of gold over her breast; a straight ridged 'sleagh,' or light spear blazing red in her right hand."-Le ture xxiii, vol. ii., O'Corry, supra.

All this is evidence of the knowledge and practice of the art of coloring in the days of Paganism in Ireland. It is no wonder that a people so conversant with the art of combining colors should, in the early years of their conversion, become so soon such adepts in dyeing, in mixing colors, in illuminating, and in penmanship.

The thoughts of Lady Wilde on this subject of the art of illuminating in Ireland appear so truthful, so natural, so beautiful, that the writer prefers to present them than to express his own :

"It was about the end of the sixth century that the fame of Irish learning and the skill of Irish artists began to extend to England, and from thence to the Continent; and Irish scribes were employed to make copies of the Gospels and teach the splendid art of illumination in the English monasteries. From that period till the end of the ninth century the Irish were a power in Europe from their learning and piety-eminent in Greek as well as in Latin, and the great teachers of scholastic theology to the Christian world. The Gospels of Lindis. farne, executed by monks of Iona in the seventh century, and

now" the glory of the British Museum," form a most important element in the early history of Keltic art, as this book seems to have been the principal model for succeeding artists.

"In the splendid Folio copy of the Gospels at Copenhagan of the tenth century, supposed to have been brought to Denmark by the King Canute, the figure of St Mathew seated, while another saint draws back a curtain, is copied from the Gospels of Lindisfarne, while the border is in the tenth century style. The Gospels of St. Chad, now in Lichfield Library, are in the Irish style of the eighth century, and are very noticeable as having marginal notes in Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and ancient British, the latter being the oldest specimen of the ancient British language now in existence. The illuminations also are copied from the Lindisfarne book. St. Chad, it is known, was educated in Ireland, in the School of St. Finian. There are Irish Gospels at Durham of the eighth century. The Gospels

of Mac-Regal are at Oxford, and the Gospels of Mac-Duran, the smallest and most beautiful known, are in the Archbishop's Palace at Lambeth. As Saxon art progressed and became in. fluenced by Roman models, the Irish scribes were chiefly employed wherever harmony of colour and extreme delicacy of touch were particularly requisite, as in the borders and initial letters. Thus, the Psalter of St. Augustin, said to be from Rome, and which resembles in style the manuscript Virgil, of the fifth century, in the Vatican, is framed in pure Keltic art. On the Continent, also, the borders of the great manu. scripts were generally confined to Irish hands. A Latin copy

of the Gospels at Treves, evidently produced by one of the establishments founded by the Irish upon the Rhine, is remarkable for a combination of Keltic, Teutonic, and FrancoByzantine art. The borders are Irish while the figures are Byzantine. These illuminated borders have the glitter and radiance of a setting of jewels, and are thus admirably suited to fulfil the true object of all ornamentation, which Mr Ruskin defines as being beautiful in its place, and perfect in its adaptation to the purpose for which it was employed.'

"In the sixth century St Gall, born in Ireland, accompanied St. Columbanus to the Continent, and founded the monastery in Switzerland that bears his name. Here many interesting manuscripts and fragments are still preserved, remarkable for

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the old Irish marginal notes to the Latin text. These are considered by philologists of such importance that thirteen quarto plates and facsimiles from them are given by Dr. Ferdinand Keller in the Zurich Society's Transactions. An interesting relic of an Irish saint is also preserved in the Cathedral of Wurtzburg-a copy of the Gospels of Killian, martyred in 689, and which was found stained with his blood on opening his tomb about five years after.

"Thus, the Irish can be tracked, as it were, across Europe by their illuminated footsteps. They were emphatically the witnesses of God, the light-bearers through the dark ages, and above all, the faithful guardians' and preservers of God's Sacred Word. A hundred years before Alfred came to Ireland to be educated, and went back to civilize his native country by the knowledge he had acquired here, the Christian schools of Germany, under the direction of Irishmen, had been founded by Charlemagne. Through France, along the Rhine, through Switzerland, Italy, and Spain the Irish missionaries taught and worked, founding schools and monasteries, and illuminating by their learning the darkest pages of European history. One of the great treasures of the Imperial Library of Paris is a beautiful Irish copy of the Latin Gospels. The College of St. Isidore, at Rome, possesses many Irish manuscripts-one of them a Psalter, folio size, written throughout in letters a quarter of an inch long, and which is considered to be the finest of the later works of the Irish school. The celebrated Golden Gospels of Stockholm are of Hiberno-Saxon art of the ninth century. This book has a singular history. It was stolen from England, and disappeared for ages, but finally was discovered at Mantua, in the seventeenth century, and purchased for the Royal Library at Stockholm. St. Petersburg also possesses a highly illuminated copy of the Gospels, which was taken from France at the time of the great Revolution, and found its way to the far north. It is a perfect and beautiful specimen of the Irish style of the eighth century, and the initial letters can only be compared to those of the Book of Kells. All those Irish manuscript Gospels are, without exception, copies of St. Jerome's Latin version.

Towards the close of the tenth century the Frankish style of ornamentation, a blending of the Classical and the Byzantine,

had almost entirely superseded the beautiful and delicate Keltie art both in England and the Continent, and about the fifteenth century it disappeared even from our own Ireland, the country of its origin. The gorgeous missals and illuminated Gospels, instinct with life, genius, holy reverence, and patient love, were destined to be replaced soon after by the dull mechanism of print; while Protestantism used all its newfound strength to destroy that innate tendency of our nature which seeks to manifest religious fervour, faith, and zeal by costly offerings and sacrifices. The golden-bordered holy books, the sculptured crosses, the jewelled shrines, were crushed under the heel of Cromwell's troopers; the majestic and beautiful abbeys were desecrated and cast down to ruin, while beside them rose the mean and ugly structures of the Reformed faith, as if the annihilation of all beauty were then considered to be the most acceptable homage which man could offer to the God who created all beauty, and £tted the human soul to enjoy and manifest the spiritual, mystic and eternal, loveliness of form, and colour, and symmetry.

Since that mournful period when the conquering iconoclasts east down the temples and crushed the spirit of our people there has been no revival of art in Ireland. It is not won. derful, therefore, that we cling with so much of fond, though sad, admiration to the beautiful memorials of the past, and welcome with warm appreciation the efforts of able, learned, and distinguished men to illustrate and preserve them.

66

SECOND THE ROUND TOWERS.

The pillar-towers of Ireland are a standing proof of the perfect knowledge in the art of building possessed by the people who at first planned and erected those defiant conquerors of time." Like the Book of Kells, they are, even at the present hour, abiding proofs of the consummate art which left to posterity such enduring monuments. In architecture as well as in the art of dyeing and painting, the ancients had regard to durability; and in this aim they have certainly surpassed all modern schools of science and art. Nothing, at the present day can be executed with pencil or chisel that would like the paintings

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and pyramids of the ancient worll, stand the test of

time.

The subject relating to the Round Towers is one that would fill a fair-sized volume; it presents dimensions and outlines far too wide for the writer to compress, and yet elucidate; to trace clearly and fully in one half chapter before the critical eye of the learned student. There is no subject just now in the literary field before men of learning and thought in Ireland, and before men of no learning, and the mere unthinking, yet reading public, so full of knotty and apparently contradictory views as that relating to the ancient towers of Ireland. The subject is worthy the attention of scholars. Men of no learning have, like children looking at the moon, been time after time viewing those towers without any profitable result. Within the past fifty years, however, much has been done by means of the sciences of paleology and comparative philology, and by discoveries made in cities built by the ancients who flourished nigh four thousand years ago. In the seventeenth century the theories of astronomers regarding lightning were the theories of children. One experiment made (June, 1752) by Dr. Franklin with his electrical kite, on the plains of Philadelphia, opened the doors of the material heavens, and all the light that flashes in the spheres, that brightens the Arctic regions at mid-night, that speeds from pole to pole, that darts from the stars, that silently permeates space, was read in an instant by the eye of the philosopher.

By the key of science, a world hidden for ages is opened up in an instant, or a new order of things starts into being. The discovery made by Professor Oersted of Copenhagan in 1819, of the action of current electricity on a magnet, has revolutionised the world and brought the ends of the earth to the bands of a village home.