It is very difficult to say what was exactly the curriculum of the early Irish colleges, and how far they were patronised by laymen. Without doubt their original design was to propagate a more perfect knowledge of the Scriptures and of theological learning in general, but it is equally certain that they must have, almost from the very first, taught the heathen classics and the Irish language side by side with the Scriptures and theology. There is no other possible way of accounting for the admirable scholarship of the men whom they turned out, and for their skill in Latin and often also in Irish poetry. Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and most of the Latin poets must have been widely taught and read. "It is sufficient," says M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, talking of Columbanus who was born in 543, and who was educated at Bangor, on Belfast Loch, "to glance at his writings, immediately to recognise his marvellous superiority over Gregory of Tours and the Gallo-Romans of his time. He lived in close converse with the classical authors, as later on did the learned men of the sixteenth century, whose equal he certainly is not, but of whom he seems a sort of precursor." From the sixth to the sixteenth century is a long leap, and no higher eulogium could be passed[Pg 216] upon the scholarship of Columbanus and the training given by his Irish college.[1] All the studies of the time appear to have been taught in them through the medium of the Irish language, not merely theology but arithmetic, rhetoric, poetry, hagiography, natural science as then understood, grammar, chronology, astronomy, Greek, and even Hebrew.

    "The classic tradition," sums up M. Darmesteter, "to all appearances dead in Europe, burst out into full flower in the Isle of Saints, and the Renaissance began in Ireland 700 years before it was known in Italy. During three centuries Ireland was the asylum of the higher learning which took sanctuary there from the uncultured states of Europe. At one time Armagh, the religious capital of Christian Ireland, was the metropolis of civilisation."

    [Pg 217]

    "Ireland," says Babington in his "Fallacies of Race Theories,"[2] "had been admitted into Christendom and to some measure of culture only in the fifth century. At that time Gaul and Italy enjoyed to the full all the knowledge of the age. In the next century the old culture-lands had to turn for some little light and teaching to that remote and lately barbarous land."

When we remember that the darkness of the Middle Ages had already set in over the struggles, agony, and confusion of feudal Europe, and that all knowledge of Greek may be said to have died out upon the Continent—"had elsewhere absolutely vanished," says M. Darmesteter—when we remember that even such a man as Gregory the Great was completely ignorant of it, it will appear extraordinary to find it taught in Ireland alone, out of all the countries of Western Europe.[3] Yet this is capable of complete and manifold proof. Columbanus for instance, shows in his letter to Pope Boniface that he knows something of both Greek and Hebrew.[4] Aileran, who died of the plague in 664, gives evidence of the same in his book on our Lord's genealogy. Cummian's letter to the Abbot of Iona has been referred to before, and, as Professor G. Stokes puts it, "proves the fact to demonstration that in the first half of the seventh century there was a wide range of Greek learning, not ecclesiastical merely, but chronological, astronomical, and philosophical, away at Durrow in the very centre of the Bog of Allen." Augustine, an un-identified Irish monk of the second half of the seventh century, gives many proofs of Greek and Oriental learning and quotes the Chronicles of Eusebius. The later Sedulius, the versatile abbot of Kildare, about the year 820 "makes parade of his Greek knowledge," to quote a French writer in the "Revue Celtique," "employs Greek words[Pg 218] without necessity, and translates into Greek a part of the definition of the pronoun."[5] St. Caimins's Psalter, seen by Bishop Ussher with the Hebrew text collated, convinced Dr. Reeves that Hebrew as well as Greek was studied in Ireland about the year 600. Nor did this Greek learning tend to die out. In the middle of the ninth century John Scotus Erigena, summoned from Ireland to France by Charles the Bald, was the only person to be found able to translate the Greek works of the pseudo-Dionysius,[6] thanks to the training he had received in his Irish school. The Book of Armagh contains the Lord's Prayer written in Greek letters, and there is a Greek MS. of the Psalter, written in Sedulius' own hand, now preserved in Paris. Many more Greek texts, at least a dozen, written by Irish monks, are preserved elsewhere in Europe. "These eighth and ninth century Greek MSS.," remarks Professor Stokes, "covered with Irish glosses and Irish poems and Irish notes, have engaged the attention of pal?ographers and students of the Greek texts of the New Testament during the last two centuries." They are indeed a proof that—as Dr. Reeves puts it—the Irish School "was unquestionably the most advanced of its day in sacred literature."

This remarkable knowledge of Greek was evidently derived from an early and direct commerce with Gaul, where Greek had been spoken for four or five centuries, first alongside of Celtic, and in later times of Latin also.[7] The knowledge[Pg 219] of Hebrew may have been derived from the Egyptian monks who passed over from Gaul into Ireland. Egypt and the East were more or less in close communication with Gaul in the fifth century, and the Irish Litany, ascribed to Angus the Culdee, commemorates seven Egyptian monks amongst many other Gauls, Germans, and Italians who resided in Ireland. The close and constant intercommunication between Greek-speaking Gaul and Ireland accounts for the planting and cultivation of the Greek language in the Irish schools, and once planted there it continued to flourish more or less for some centuries. There is ample evidence to prove the connection between Gaul and Ireland from the fifth to the ninth century. We find Gaulish merchants in the middle of Ireland at Clonmacnois, who had no doubt sailed up the Shannon in the way of commerce, selling wine to Ciaran in the sixth century. We find Columbanus, a little later on, inquiring at Nantes for a vessel engaged in the Irish trade—qu? vexerat commercium cum Hibernia. In Adamnan's Life of Columcille we find mention of Gaulish sailors arriving at Cantire. Adamnan's own treatise on Holy Places was written from the verbal account of a Gaul. In the Old Irish poem on the Fair of Carman in Wexford—a pagan institution which lived on in Christian times—we find mention of the

"Great market of the foreign Greeks,
Where gold and noble clothes were wont to be;"[8]

the foreign Greeks being no doubt the Greek-speaking Gaulish merchants. Alcuin sends his gifts of money and oil and his letters direct from Charlemagne's court to his friends in Clonmacnois, probably by a vessel engaged in the direct Irish trade, for, as he himself tells us, the sea-route between England and France was then closed. If more proof of the[Pg 220] close communication between Ireland and Gaul were wanted, the fact that Dagobert II., king of France in the seventh century, was educated at Slane,[9] in Ireland, and also that certain Merovingian and French coins have been found here, should be sufficient.

The fame of these early Irish schools attracted students in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries from all quarters to Ireland, which had now become a veritable land of schools and scholars. The Venerable Bede tells us of the crowds of Anglo-Saxons who flocked over into Ireland during the plague, about the year 664, and says that they were all warmly welcomed by the Irish, who took care that they should be provided with food every day, without payment on their part; that they should have books to read, and that they should receive gratuitous instruction from Irish masters.[10] Books must have already multiplied considerably when the swarms of Anglo-Saxons could thus be supplied with them gratis. This noble tradition of free education to strangers lasted down to the establishment of the so-called "National" schools in Ireland, for down to that time "poor scholars" were freely supported by the people and helped in their studies. The number of scribes whose deaths have been considered worth recording by the annalists is very great, and books consequently must have been very numerous. This plentifulness of books probably added to the renown of the Irish schools. An English prince as well as a French one was educated by them in the seventh century; this was Aldfrid, king of Northumbria, who[Pg 221] was trained in all the learning of Erin, and who always aided and abetted the Irish in England, in opposition to Wilfrid, who opposed them. That the king got a good education in Ireland may be conjectured from the fact that Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury, dedicated to him a poetic epistle on Latin metric and prosody, in which, says Dr. Healy, "he congratulates the king on his good fortune in having been educated in Ireland." Aldhelm's own master was also an Irishman, Mael-dubh, and his abbacy of Malmesbury is only a corruption of this Irishman's name Maeldubh's-bury.[11] In another place Aldhelm tells us that while the great English school at Canterbury was by no means overcrowded, the English swarmed to the Irish schools like bees. Aldfrid himself, when leaving Ireland, composed a poem of sixty lines in the Irish language and metre, which he must have learned from the bards, in which he compliments each of the provinces severally, as though he meant to thank the whole nation for their hospitality.[12]

"I found in Inisfail the fair
In Ireland, while in exile there,
Women of worth, both grave and gay men,
Learned clerics, heroic laymen.

[Pg 222]I travelled its fruitful provinces round,
And in every one of the five I found,
Alike in church and in palace hall,
Abundant apparel and food for all."

St. Willibrord, a Saxon noble educated in Ireland about the same time with King Aldfrid, went out thence and ultimately became Archbishop of Utrecht. Another noted scholar of the same period was Agilbert, a Frank by birth, who spent a long time in Ireland for the purpose of study and afterwards became Bishop of Paris.[13] We have seen how the Office of St. Cathaldus states that the school of Lismore was visited by Gauls, Angles, Scotti, Teutons, and scholars from other neighbouring nations. The same was more or less the case with Clonmacnois, Bangor, and some others of the most noted of the Irish schools.

It was not in Greek attainments, nor in ecclesiastical studies, nor in Latin verses alone, tha............