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The Stream of Civilization
planted by Irish hands and that seldom blossomed except
when Irish hands were there to tend it. The civilization
of Anglo-Saxon England was not a self-perpetuating
civilization. There were men among the early English
here and there who raised themselves by prodigious effort
above the mud and blood in which the mass of their
countrymen dragged their lives. But they died in gloom
and they had no heirs or successors. Schools of note
also arose from time to time in England ; but they were
short lived. Canterbury died with Theodore and Adrian
who established it. Jarrow died with Bede. York, the
most noted of the English schools,
of which the chief
ornament was Alcuin, had a life of hardly fifty years.
But of the great Irish schools few fell by the wayside.
Armagh, Clonmacnois, Clonfert, Clonard, lona, Bangor,
Moville, Clonenagh, Glendalough, Lismore, and the
others, great monastic cities and studia generalia, centers
of all the studies and all the arts and industries of their
time, well over thirty in number, with a huge train of
lesser lay and professional schools, maintained their
magnificent course almost to the close of the Middle
Ages. Founded in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries,
most of them were in full vigor, despite Danes and despite
conflagrations, when the first Norman and Angevin
from the
French, a century after they had taken England
English, settled in Ireland toward the close of the
twelfth century, and some of them endured till the begin-
ning of the English devastations in the sixteenth century.
Armagh, founded three centuries before Bagdad, was, in
1169, under the authority of the High King Ruadhri, of
the Ua Concubhair dynasty, erected into a national uni-
versity for all Ireland and all Scotland.
In that age there had been nothing comparable with
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