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Ireland and the Making of Britain
this sustained continuity in any land, save perhaps the
wonderful succession of scholarchs in the groves of
Academe from the time of Plato to the time of Justinian.
The existence of these Irish schools, annually receiving
crowds of foreign students, annually sending crowds of
graduates and preceptors to other lands nurturing the
entire western world through a thousand channels, visible
and invisible, is almost the central phenomenon
of the
early Middle Ages. The literary output must have
rivaled the fecundity of the Syrians under the Abassidae
or of the schoolmen of the age of Aquinas and Duns
Scotus, over a period more prolonged than was given
to either. And Irish as well as Latin was the literary
vehicle. The early medieval glosses extant in the Irish
tongue, marvelously developed thus early to express the
most delicate shades of feeling and thought, exceed the
contemporary scholia in all the living languages west of
Constantinople put together. 1
2. MISSIONARY INSTINCT OF IRISH CULTURE
It is only in the nature of things that an intellectual
energy so abounding should in course of time overflow
the confines of Ireland itself and extend its operations to
other lands. The field open to the missionary instinct of
Ireland's Christianized civilization was assuredly wide,
for from Britain and Merovingian France almost to the
confines of Asia a wilderness of barbarism presented an
almost unbroken surface. In the year 529 the Emperor
Justinian had closed the school of Athens. But the schools
of Constantinople were still flourishing and the relics of
the Brucheion and Serapeum of Alexandria had not yet
been swept by Arab hordes. Between Constantinople
i They have been collected in Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus,
by Stokes and Strachan.
4
2 Vols., edited