O’Duffy, its primary object being to enshrine a portion of the true cross that was sent to the king in 1123.  Brought to Cong some years afterwards, probably by the archbishop, who died there in 1150, it was concealed at the time of the Reformation, but at the beginning of the present century was still in the possession of the last abbot, and at his death it was purchased by professor MacCullagh and presented by him to the museum of the Royal Irish Academy.  This wonderful work is alone well worth a visit to Dublin, but not less lovely is the chalice of Ardagh, a two-handled silver cup, absolutely classical in its perfect purity of form, and decorated with gold and amber and crystal and with varieties of cloisonne and champleve enamel.  There is no mention of this cup, or of the so-called Tara brooch, in ancient Irish history.  All that we know of them is that they were found accidentally, the former by a boy who was digging potatoes near the old Rath of Ardagh, the latter by a poor child who picked it up near the seashore.  They both, however, belong probably to the tenth century.

Of all these works, as well as of the bell shrines, book-covers, sculptured crosses and illuminated designs in manuscripts, excellent pictures are given in Miss Stokes’s handbook.  The extremely interesting Fiachal Phadrig, or shrine of St. Patrick’s tooth, might have been figured and noted as an interesting example of the survival of ornament, and one of the old miniatures of the scribe or Evangelist writing would have given an additional interest to the chapter on Irish MSS.  On the whole, however, the book is wonderfully well illustrated, and the ordinary art student will be able to get some useful suggestions from it.  Indeed, Miss Stokes, echoing the aspirations of many of the great Irish archaeologists, looks forward to the revival of a native Irish school in architecture, sculpture, metal-work and painting.  Such an aspiration is, of course, very laudable, but there is always a danger of these revivals being merely artificial reproductions, and it may be questioned whether the peculiar forms of Irish ornamentation could be made at all expressive of the modern spirit.  A recent writer on house decoration has gravely suggested that the British householder should take his meals in a Celtic dining-room adorned with a dado of Ogham inscriptions, and such wicked proposals may serve as a warning to all who fancy that the reproduction of a form necessarily implies a revival of the spirit that gave the form life and meaning, and who fail to recognise the difference between art and anachronisms.  Miss Stokes’s proposal for an ark-shaped church in which the mural painter is to repeat the arcades and ’follow the architectural compositions of the grand pages of the Eusebian canons in the Book of Kells,’ has, of course, nothing grotesque about it, but it is not probable that the artistic genius of the Irish people will, even when ‘the land has rest,’ find in such interesting imitations its healthiest