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The Stream of Civilization
the Dneiper valley and preached along the Elbe. They
formed literary colonies in Liege, Toul, Cologne, Milan,
Salzburg, Rheims, Tours, Aix-la-Chapelle, Verdun,
Metz, Cambrai, Rome, Constantinople, and other centers.
They sent out scientific expeditions to measure the Pyramids
and to explore the Red Sea. They scoured the
northern and southern seas for islands, and besides Iceland
they discovered the Faroe Islands and seem to have known
the Azores.
In the Carolingian era they were teachers in every
cathedral and school. They initiated and conducted the
Carolingian revival, a movement of far more import to
Europe than that later renaissance which has appropriated
the name. In the ninth century their intellectual prestige
was so great that a minister of Charles the Bald hailed
them as rivals of the Greeks and it became the fashion of
the literati of Laon to study the Irish language 1 and
Irish literature as at Rheims Greek was studied under
Irish preceptors, who in that age were the sole possessors
of Greek learning in the West. In their scriptoria the
Roman classics were reproduced and preserved. Alone
in Europe in that age they cultivated pagan literature
side by side with Christian divinity. The oldest of several
of the Roman classics are Irish manuscripts. Irish foun-
dations proved the great
treasure houses of the master-
pieces of ancient Roman literature, and the list is long
of those Roman authors for whose survival we are in-
debted to Irish scribes and Irish foundations. They were
i We can best judge of the development of the Irish language at this period
by the extant eighth and ninth century Irish commentaries and glosses which
stand on a high level by comparison, for example, with old High German glosses:
"We find here a fully formed learned prose style which allows even the finest
shades of thought to be easily and perfectly expressed, from which we must
conclude that there must have been a long previous culture (of the language),
going back at the very latest to the beginning of the sixth century." (Meyer,
Kultur der Gegenwart, part I, sect. XI, p. 80.)
II