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Rh contents were such as were certain to attract him. He was a philosopher born, and the blend of Neo-Platonism and Christianity in these writings was exactly suited to his temperament. He performed his work in a way that excited the wonder of a very competent scholar at Rome: for in 860 the translation was sent to Pope Nicholas, and he referred it for an opinion to his librarian Anastasius, who had done much work of the kind. Anastasius marvels how a man from a remote and barbarous land could have attained such mastery of Greek; Irish learning was evidently an unknown thing to him.

In his dedications of his version to the Emperor, and also in a good many of his occasional poems, John ventures upon original Greek verse composition: here he is at his weakest, both as poet and as prosodist; the scansion is surprisingly bad. The Dionysius was followed by the Ambigua of Maximus, also a difficult text to translate and not one of much importance. Most likely no other philosophical text (if we except the Solutiones of Priscianus Lydus, as to which there is doubt) came into John's hands. He made no other translations, but turned to the composition of his last and greatest work, to which he gave a Greek title, (867). Little copied, for it soon became suspect of pantheism, it is the most original piece of speculative thought which these centuries have to shew. Nothing so remarkable probably was put forth until Anselm came.

Other works by John to which no precise date has been assigned are his excerpts from Macrobius on the verb, which preserve all we have of a very valuable book, a fragmentary commentary on St John's Gospel in which he makes use of the Greek text, and commentaries on Martianus Capella and Boethius. We still await a critical edition of the whole of the works of this very marked scholar and thinker. It is unfair to judge of his personality from silence, but the fact remains that there is no written tribute to any but his intellectual gifts.

Sedulius Scottus is found at Liège about 848, and after a lapse of ten years becomes untraceable. In him we have no original thinker, but a writer of some skill, a most industrious compiler and transcriber, and a lover of ancient literature. His book De rectoribus Christianis addressed to Lothar II, interspersed with pieces of verse in many metres (after the fashion of Boethius) and with copious quotations from the Proverbia Graecorum (see p. 504), is his best original composition. There are, too, many fugitive pieces of verse, some addressed to his patrons, one or two to his Irish companions, others descriptive of works of art, for example, a silken pall embroidered with a long series of scenes from the life of St Peter. Under the head of compilations we reckon his collections on St Matthew and on the Pauline Epistles (the former as yet unprinted) and his Commentaries on grammatical works, Priscian, Donatus, Eutychius. In the last-named, which was very likely written in Ireland, he uses that tract of Macrobius on the verb, of which John has been the chief preserver.