BEAUTIFUL BOOK MAKING 
tioned (the eighth century) the great period of art 
of the earlier Renaissance in the thirteenth century 
and of the later Renaissance in the fifteenth and six- 
teenth were as yet so far away in the distant future, 
that it would seem a priori quite out of the question 
that any such assertion could possibly be true. Only 
that we have the book itself to bear out the asser- 
tion, no one would believe for a moment that the 
rude and barbarous people whom almost all the 
world would inevitably suppose the Irish to have 
been in the eighth century could by any possible 
stretch of the imagination be conceived as making 
and completing the most beautiful book that ever 
came from the hand of man. And yet this is exactly 
what the actual specimen that we possess demon- 
strates beyond all doubt. 
There are a number of these marvelous old Irish 
books though one stands out above all the others. 
The world is now very well agreed that the Irish 
illumination of manuscript which characterizes these 
books is the most beautiful of its genre that ever 
was done. It is a never ending source of surprise 
that over a thousand years ago the Irish should have 
thought so much of books as to devote all this time 
and labor as well as painstaking artistry to them, 
but we have a number of striking examples as the 
proofs and we can only listen to the declarations of 
those who know them best. Father Power in his 
“Early Christian Ireland” said: 
“There suddenly blazed forth in the eighth cen- 
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