Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/93



Carmen B.

following notes which have been gleaned from time to time in various quarters are now strung together, with the hope of adding somewhat to the evidence amassed by other hands in illustration of the rise, the progress, and the numerous vicissitudes of sacred learning in our own and in the sister-island.

What were men's ideas of the, in the period that elapsed between the planting of the Christian faith and the revival of letters in the fifteenth century? Did they read it? Did they study it? And if they did, with what auxiliaries, and what success? are questions always full of interest, and more especially in such a thoughtful and inquiring age as ours. I purpose, therefore, to produce some data for the solving of these questions, not of course pretending to exhaust them, but desirous of supplying to the general reader a fair specimen of the materials he will find on turning to original authorities.

The present paper will be limited to a brief notice of the early scholars in communion with the Keltic, and especially the Irish Church; the period being that which preceded the invasions of the Northmen: for in truth, as Ireland had no Alfred, those invasions proved almost a death-blow to her scholarship. I hope to touch in some future paper on the service rendered by our Anglo-Saxon worthies, such as Aldhelm, Beda, Alcuin, and the rest, who, as the consequence of their estrangement from at least one section of the Keltic Christians, constitute a separate chain of teachers, and an independent class of witnesses.

Although the Gospel had been widely spread in Britain, and in Ireland also, long before the date most commonly assigned to the mission of St Patrick (432), he must be regarded as the first of either country who is known to have been a student of theology. The narratives respecting him are, it is true, on many 6—2