There is no old book in any part of the world so skilfully ornamented as this. The capital letters are very large--one of them fills an entire page--and are all illuminated, that is, painted in brilliant colours; and after the lapse of so many centuries the colours are still very fresh, though not so bright as when they were first laid on.
In this Book of Kells, and in others like it, the capitals are ornamented in every part with a kind of interlaced work, all done with the pen, in which bands and ribbons are curved and plaited and woven in the most wonderful way. These plaits and folds are so small and so close together that one must sometimes use a magnifying glass in order to see them plainly: in one space, the size of a half penny, in a page of a splendid old volume, called the Book of Armagh, the ribbons appear woven in and out more than three hundred times.
A specimen of this interwoven ornamental work is seen at the head of the first page of this book; but it gives only a poor idea of the beauty of the Book of Kells. The frontispiece of the "Child's History of Ireland" is a perfect copy, in full colours, of a complete page of the Book of Mac Durnan, which is almost as beautiful as the Book of Kells. The Irish used this sort of ornamentation also in metal-work and stone-work, of which an example is given here.
[Illustration: Ancient Irish Ornamental Sculpture on a Stone Monument.]
Very often, large volumes were kept, into which were written compositions of all kinds, both prose and poetry, such as were thought worth preserving, copied from older books, and written in, one after another, till the volume was filled. Of all these old books of mixed compositions, the largest that remains to us is the Book of Leinster, which is kept in Trinity College in Dublin. It is an immense volume, all in the Irish language, written more than 750 years ago; and many of the pages are now almost black with age and very hard to make out. It contains a great number of pieces, some in prose and some in verse, and nearly all of them about Ireland--histories, accounts of battles and sieges, lives and adventures of great men, with many tales and stories of things that happened in this country in far distant ages.