508 
manship, varies very much ; and we bave not as yet sufficient 
evidence to warrant us in assigning to each period its peculiar 
style ; but this much may be said, that most of those which 
are the earliest, and which must probably be referred to the 
seventh century, are superior in the treatment of the human 
figures upon them, whilst they are, perhaps, inferior in the 
designs of their scrollwork and interlacing to others which 
are certainly of later date, and to some of the same period ; 
and the reason for this is to be assigned to the fact that 
there were two distinct schools of art in Northumbria, the 
Roman, introduced by St. Paulinus and his brethren, and 
again by St. Wilfrid, nearly forty years later ; and the Irish, 
introduced by St. Aidan and the missionaries from Hu. 
This conjecture is confirmed by comparison of the MSS., 
written by these two schools. Of the Roman School 
there is a fine example in the psalter of St. Augustin, 
among the Cotton MSS. in the British Museum. The 
writing is either that of an Italian, or of one who had 
been trained by an Italian master ; the figure of the 
Psalmist at the head of the book is almost classical in 
design, and so are some of the ornaments, whilst others, 
particularly in the borders and the initial letters, ap- 
proach more nearly to those of the Northumbrian Irish 
School.* In the Irish MSS., on the contrary, and 
in those written in England by the Irish school of 
Lindisfarne, in the seventh and eighth centuries, nothing 
can exceed the perfection of the scrolls, frets, and inter- 
lacings, and scarcely anything the barbarity of the attempts 
to delineate animal and human forms. So on the earliest 
* The Irish and the Anglo-Saxon Schools of Ornament had, of course, a common 
origin, for St. Patrick was trained, for the work of his apostleship in Ireland, at 
Tours under St. Martin, at Rome, in the islands of the Mediterranean, and then 
at Auxerre under St. German. So if we find in the Kentish MSS. ornaments 
similar to those which were employed in the illumination of MSS. at the same 
time in Ireland, we can only regard both as developments of the same original 
style. 
