ST. BRIDGET
Of course it would be easy to think that after all
Gerald the Welshman was only a twelfth century
native of Wales without any particular culture or
artistic appreciation who happened to have wand-
ered as far away from home as Ireland and was
rather ready to find wonders on the way. He had
probably almost never seen, so the supposed com-
mentator might continue, an illuminated copy of the
Scriptures before, and he would therefore be quite
carried away with almost anything that applied a
variety of color to the initial letters and to certain
pages of the Scriptures. So far from any such fan-
cied description fitting in with Giraldus Cambrensis
as we know him, it is about as far away as possible
from his actual character and experience. Gerald
the Welshman had traveled across Europe several
times, he had visited France and Italy as well as
Switzerland and possibly had been in Spain, he had
seen most of the beautiful things of that period and
they were not few in that twelfth century which
rivals even the thirteenth as the greatest of cen-
turies. No one we know was better fitted to appre-
ciate the beauties of a wonderful illuminated manu-
script than Gerald. His compliment to the illum-
inated Scriptures of Kildare must therefore be
accounted as a very high tribute indeed. It might
be easy to think that this was only the exaggeratedly
enthusiastic description of a traveler of the Middle
Ages knowing little about such things, only that we
possess in the Book of Kells a magnificent example
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