umber of colors marked the social rank: the king
might wear seven colors, poets and learned men six; five colors were
permitted in the clothes of chieftains, and thus grading down to the
servant, who might wear but one. All this the scribe knew well. We
can picture the humble servant of God, clad in a coarse robe of a
single color, deep in his chosen labor of recording the life and
teachings of his Master, and striving to endow this record with the
glory of the seven colors which were rightly due to a King alone. As
we gaze on his work today its beauty is instinct with life, and the
patient love that gave it birth seems to cling to it still. The white
magic of the artist's holy hands has bridged the span of a thousand
years.

REFERENCES:

O'Curry: Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish
History (Dublin, 1861); Brunn: An Enquiry into the Art of the
Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, Part I, Celtic
Illuminated Manuscripts (Edinburgh, 1897); Robinson: Celtic
Illuminative Art in the Gospels of Durrow, Lindisfarne, and Kells
(Dublin, 1908); Westwood: The Book of Kells, a lecture given in
Oxford, November, 1886 (Dublin, 1887); Gougaud: Repertoire des
fac-similes des manuscripts irlandais (Paris, 1913).

THE RUINS OF IRELAND

By FRANCIS JOSEPH BIGGER, M.R.I.A.

The ruins of Ireland are her proudest monuments. They stand as a
lasting revelation to all mankind--a distinct and definite
proclamation that the Irish people, century after century, were able
to raise and adorn some of the finest buildings in stone that western
civilization has seen or known. It is recognized the world over that
Irish art has a beauty and distinction all its own, in its own Irish
setting unrivalled, throned in its own land, in its own natural
surroundings. The shrines and gospels, the reliquaries and missals,
the crosses and bells that are still existent, many in Ireland,
others in every country in the world, attest beyond any dispute that
Irish art-workers held a preeminent place in the early middle ages,
and that works of Irish art are still treasured as unique in their
day and time. No country has been plundered and desolated as Ireland
has been. Dane, Norman, English--each in turn swept across the fair
face of Ireland, carrying destruction in their train, yet withal
Ireland has her art treasures and her ruins that bear favorable
comparison with those of other civilizations.

In Dublin and in many private Iris