edition of Adamnan, p. 354, in order to illustrate the fact that Greek was known among the ancient Irish monks; while again, discussing the constitution of the Monastery of Iona, he says (p. 352):-" The primary subject of study (at Iona) was the reading of Holy Scripture, and in particular the committing to memory the Book of Psalms. Besides the Holy Scripture there was the study Scripturarum tam liberalium quam Ecclesiasticarum, the former including the Latin and the Greek languages."

The next authority I shall cite will be Columbanus. He lived from about 540 to 620. He is a good witness for the practice of the second half of the sixth century. We have abundance of his works still extant, and all of undoubted authenticity. He was educated at first on an island in Lough Erne, where, while still a very young man, he composed a commentary on the Book of Psalms, which has, within the last ten years, been printed for the first time by Ascoli at Milan. In that commentary he discusses points of Hebrew scholarship as in his exposition of the 110th Psalm. His works previously known display the same range of scholarship. In his Epistle to Pope Boniface he plays upon his own name, Columba, and turns it into Greek and Hebrew, TEPLOTEρά and Jonah or. This point has not escaped the eagle eye of Dr. Reeves, who points out, in his Adamnan (p. 5), that exactly the same identification of the name of Columba with the Hebrew Jonah and the Greek Teρioтeρá finds place in Adamnan's second preface to "St. Columba's Life." So much for the sixth century. I now pass to the seventh century. I here cite as a witness the letter of Cummian of the Columban Monastery of Durrow, in the King's County, written to Segienus, Abbot of Iona, in the year 634. That epistle is a marvellous composition. You will find it in Ussher's "Sylloge Veterum Epistolarum Hibernicarum." It discusses the vexed question concerning the time of keeping Easter, which was then troubling all Ireland. Cummian took the Roman side as against the Columban view. I call it a marvellous composition because of the vastness of its learning. It quotes, besides the Scriptures and Latin authors, Greek writers like

there is an exposition of the Gallican ritual, published towards the close of the sixth century, which lays down the following rule for Mass:-"Aius vero ante prophetiam cantatur in Graeca lingua. Incipiente praesule Aius psallit, dicens latino cum greco." See Martene, Thesaurus Anecd. v. 91; and J. Rendel Harris, Codex Bezae, p. 18. The early Gallican use was, I believe, the ritual followed and the liturgy used in Wales and Ireland-a view which this story about St. Gildas confirms. I have in "Ireland and the Celtic Church," p. 318, given another instance of identity between early Irish and Gallican rites.

Origen, Cyril, Pachomius, the head and reformer of Egyptian monasticism, and Damascius, the last of the celebrated Neo-Platonic Philosophers of Athens, who lived about the year 500, and wrote all his works in Greek. Cummian discusses the calendars of the Macedonians, Hebrews, and Copts, giving us the Hebrew, Greek, and Egyptian names of months and cycles, and tells us that he had been sent as one of a deputation of learned men a few years before to ascertain the practice of the Church of Rome. When they came to Rome they lodged in one hospital with a Greek and a Hebrew, an Egyptian and a Scythian, who told them that the whole world celebrated the Roman and not the Irish Easter. This long letter, which takes up twelve closely printed pages of Ussher, 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. The next witness I summon is Aileran, called the wise or sapiens, Abbot of Clonard, twentyfive miles west of Dublin. He died in the great plague which ravaged Ireland in the year 664 and 665, and proved fatal to a great many of our ancient scholars. He wrote a great deal, but the only work which remains extant is his commentary on the genealogy of our Lord, which has been printed in Mign's "Patrologia Latina," t. lxxx., col. 328. He takes each name, discusses its meaning in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, deducing conclusions which might not, perhaps, be accepted by modern critics, but which prove his extensive scholarship. Here, however, it may be said, these Hebrew references which you speak of do not show that the writers knew anything at all of Hebrew save what they might have picked up out of St. Jerome's massive commentaries on the Bible. I cannot, however, accept such a view. The Irish scholars of the sixth and seventh centuries knew the Hebrew text, and used the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, as we expressly learn from Ussher's "Antiquities" (Works, vol. vi. p. 544), where he tells us of St. Caminus, of Inis-caltra, in Lough Derg, that he himself (Ussher) had seen St. Camin's Psalter, "having a collation of the Hebrew text placed on the upper part of each page, and with brief scholia added on the exterior margin," a passage which, in Dr. Reeves's opinion, proves that the Hebrew language was studied by the ancient Irish scholars about the year 600.1

1 Ussher's words are: "Habebatur psalterium, cujus unicum tantum quaternionem mihi videre contigit, obelis et asteriscis diligentissime distinctum; collatione cum veritate Hebraica in superiore parte cujusque paginae posita, et brevibus

Augustine, the Irish monk of the seventh century, affords another proof for my argument. He wrote a book on the "Difficulties of Scripture," which was long attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo, but which proves its Hibernian origin by several facts. Augustine mentions St. Manchan, of Lemanaghan, in the King's County, and St. Baithen, who lived beside the Hill of Usnagh, between Mullingar and Athlone, in the county Westmeath, and died in the great plague of 664, to which I have just now alluded. But that is not the only proof of this Augustine's Irish origin which his writings afford; for he tells us of the animals inhabiting Ireland, the ebb and flow of the tides on the Irish coast, and the natural forces by which Ireland was separated from the continent of Europe; upon all which points I beg to refer to Dr. Reeves's Memoir, printed in our own Proceedings (vol. vii., p. 514). Among other evidences of his Greek and Oriental knowledge which this Augustine, who lived in the second half of the seventh century, gives, he quotes the "Chronicle of Eusebius."

But I must not weary you with too great a multitude of details, and must therefore hasten on to the eighth century. Here I summoned to my assistance the names of Bede and of Alcuin. They were English scholars it may be replied. But then they were English scholars who gained their knowledge at Irish hands; for the North of England, where they were both trained, was in the eighth century covered with Irish schools. Here let me quote an authority whom most people will allow to be decisive on a question of early English history. I refer to Dr. Stubbs, now Bishop of Oxford. He wrote the articles on Bede and Alcuin in the "Dictionary of Christian Biography"; and in them he tells us that Bede was trained at Jarrow under Trumbert, the disciple of St. Chad, and Sigfrid, the fellow-pupil of St. Cuthbert, under Boisil and Eata; "from these," Dr. Stubbs says, "he derived the Irish knowledge of Scripture and discipline." Now, Bede was a good scholar. Dr. Stubbs tells us that "he certainly knew Greek, and had some knowledge of Hebrew." Alcuin, too, was largely trained under Irish influences, and he retained, as his epistles and correspondence prove, the liveliest interest in the Irish schools, sending subsidies even from the distant Court of France away to the poor scholars of Clonmacnois. Alcuin, according to Dr. Stubbs, was acquainted with the Latin poets; knew Greek and some Hebrew. Let me conclude this brief notice of the eighth century by calling your

scholiis ad exteriorem marginem adjectis." Dr. Reeves expresses his opinion on this point in the Index he appended to Ussher's works.

special attention to the fact that we know of two native Greek scholars who passed, the one into Ireland, the other into England, about this period. Virgil, the Geometer Abbot of Aghabo, in the Queen's County, left Ireland for Salzburg, in Upper Austria, about the year 740. Ussher, in his "Sylloge" (iv. 462), tells us that his companion on that missionary journey was Dobdan, a Greek; and then adds: "I should wonder, indeed, that a Greek should come from this Ireland of ours, unless I knew that at Trim a church exists which to this day retains the name of the Greek Church." Dobdan was a learned man, and became an eminent teacher at Salzburg. Surely he must have imparted a knowledge of Greek to the monks and students of Aghabo.1 And now for the other. Theodore, of Tarsus, came into England as Archbishop of Canterbury about the year 670. His great work in England was educational. He established a celebrated school at Canterbury. Among the students who flocked to it were large numbers of Irishmen whom, we are told by an ancient chronicle, he treated as a wild boar does a pack of hounds. Greek was there studied with such success that Bede, writing sixty years afterwards, tells us that "there are still living at this day some of Theodore's scholars who are as well versed in the Greek and Latin tongues as in their own, in which they were born" (Bede, iv. 2).

I now come to the ninth century. I hope you will be satisfied with two writers drawn from this period. Sedulius was Abbot of Kildare about the year 820. He was a learned man, as his commentaries on the Epistles of St. Paul show. These commentaries have been printed in various shapes, and have been reprinted of late years in the "Patrologia Latina" of the Abbé Migne. Well now take up his "Commentary on the Romans," and you will find Sedulius showing his Greek and Hebrew learning in connexion with the very first verse of that Epistle, "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ." He takes the word " apostle." He gives it in its Greek shape ȧTÓσTOλos; in its Hebrew shape, writing it in correct Hebrew characters without vowel points, and then discusses the difference between ἀπόστολος and ἄγγελος. They cannot have been such an ignorant lot after all in the monastery of Kildare in the year 820. Now, let us hear Ussher on Sedulius and his knowledge of Greek. That

1 The writer of the article on Dobdan in the "Dictionary of Christian Biography" differs from Ussher, and will not admit that Dobdan was a Greek. 2 "It occurs but once in the LXX, in 1 Kings, xiv. 6, as a translation of ."-Lightfoot, "Galatians," p. 93. Lond. 1866.

eminent scholar wrote a work on the religion of the ancient Irish, where he poured out the treasures of his learning in a more popular shape than was usual with him. He deals with this very point in vol. iv. of Elrington's edition of his works, p. 245, where he says: "As for the edition of the Scriptures used in Ireland at those times, the Latin translation was so received into common use among the learned that the principal authority was still reserved to the original fountains. Therefore doth Sedulius in the Old Testament commend unto us the Hebrew verity, and in the New correct oftentimes the vulgar Latin according to the truth of the Greek copies." And then Ussher goes on to give us four or five pages of examples to prove his case, with which I need not trouble you. I shall only remark that Sedulius could scarcely have corrected the vulgar Latin by the Greek text, unless he knew Greek and used the Greek text. But then it is the habit to decry men like Ussher. They are old-fashioned. They knew nothing of the latest results of modern scientific research. So I appeal to another authority about Sedulius. The "Revue Celtique" is not an old-fashioned authority. The first volume was published during the years 1870-72. Now, in vol. i., on p. 264, you will find an article by an eminent French scholar, Charles Thurot, on some grammatical works by Sedulius, Abbot of Kildare. Sedulius published commentaries on Priscian, Donatus, and Eutychius. Some of these still survive in MS. in France. Thurot, describing one of them in this short article, touches upon our point, and says: "Sedulius makes parade of his Greek knowledge. He employs Greek words without necessity, and translates into Greek a part of the definition of the pronoun." Or take another authority, who can scarcely be yet called old-fashioned. Cardinal Mai published, in 1825, a great work, in ten volumes, called "Veterum Scriptorum Nova Collectio." In the 9th volume, pp. 159– 181, you will find a work of Sedulius's on the Gospels, which Mai discovered in the Vatican Library, containing numerous proofs and marks of his Greek and his Hebrew scholarship.

So much for Sedulius: and now for one other case belonging to the ninth century, which one will be Johannes Scotus Erigena. I need not dwell on Scotus. He went from Bangor to the Court of France, and was the ornament of that Court in days when learned men flocked thither from every quarter. The works of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite had just then been brought from the East, and were creating great interest in learned circles. The only person found capable of translating them was Johannes Scotus, who gained all his knowledge at Bangor on Belfast Lough. Perhaps the best proof I can