Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/31

 Rh the discipline of the Druid and in the Bardic schools of distracted Ireland in the sixteenth century.

Irish mediæval manuscripts have preserved to us only a small part of the lore of the schools, but the legal Tracts, the Dinsenchus, the Dialogue of the Ancients, the many fragmentary Tales (often jotted down merely as memoranda) are specimens of the kind of traditional matter handed down by the organisation. But it is evident that the acceptance of Christianity must have profoundly disturbed the subject matter and importance of the pagan schools, so that for the last twelve centuries before the end came the greater part of the old teaching must have been modified or omitted; but though many of the spells and stories of the gods and the mass of heathen cosmogony and eschatology vanished, the method remained, and we have still much genealogy, law, romance, history and poetry of the old days. The place of the heathen religious matter was filled by the sacred history of the Church schools, where the interpretation and language of the sacred books of the Christians, and the rules and law of the Church Catholic were assiduously taught, where reading was, of course, permitted, and the degree attained was that of Sai or Doctor of Divinity.

But it is in the antipodes that by far the best example of the heathen university for an unlettered people is to be found. In the excellent and invaluable Maori history of John White, we have an account of a system of schools by which all valuable knowledge was accurately and orally handed down. Chief of these was the Red House, Wharekura, raised in a sacred place, consecrated by a living sacrifice in which need-fire was employed, the sons of priests, having had spells recited over them, occupied this place from nightfall to dawn in the Autumn, and studied from sunset to midnight for four or five months in succession. They were fed at the public expense, they were strictly disciplined, they were kept apart from the rest of the people, so that no distraction should interrupt the effort