as we
can now see, was the beginning of that Irish learning which has been so
widely, yet so vaguely, extolled. Ireland, then, in the late fifth
century and the sixth, holds the lamp. Its light passes to England in
the middle of the seventh century, and from thence, near the end of the
eighth, to the Court of Charlemagne, where it initiates the Carolingian
Renaissance. In the ninth century, when England is a prey to the Danes,
the Carolingian Court and the great abbeys of Germany are enjoying a
vigorous intellectual life, stimulated and enriched by scholars from
Italy and from Ireland. In a general view the tenth and eleventh
centuries must figure as a period of degeneration; the twelfth as one of
immense intellectual and artistic vigour, culminating in the thirteenth.
In the fourteenth the foundations of what we call the Renaissance are
already being laid, and we have hardly passed the middle of the
fifteenth before the MS. has received its death-blow in the publication
of the first printed Bible.

This absurdly condensed review of ten centuries has, I believe, some
truth in it, in spite of the fact that every clause needs qualification.
We shall have to go over the same ground again a little more slowly. At
present we will devote a little time to the beginnings of our period.

A few relics of the days before the Barbarian invasion have reached us.
I am not thinking of the library of rolls found at Herculaneum in the
eighteenth century, the unrolling and decipherment of which still goes
on slowly at Naples, nor of the many precious fragments of rolls and
books which have come in our own generation from Egypt, but rather of
those which have been preserved above ground in libraries. Such are the
Virgils of the Vatican, of St. Gall, and of Florence.

Perhaps a word about these ancient Virgils will not be unwelcome. They
are cited in all the textbooks, it is true, but I think they are apt to
be confused; at any rate it is easy to confuse them.

They are five in number: three very fragmentary, two more or less
complete. The surnames they go by are _Sangallensis_, _Augusteus_,
_Vaticanus_, _Romanus_, _Mediceus_.

_Sangallensis_ and _Augusteus_ are practically the only pieces of books
we have which are written in the old square capitals, like those of the
Roman inscriptions. _Sangallensis_ consists of a few leaves which were
found by Von Arx, a librarian of St. Gall, in the bindings of books in
that abbey's library. Of _