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"High Scholars of the Western World"
which reached its culmination during the sixth and^fol-
1
lowing centuries." The graduates of the Irish academies
wrote Latin, not to speak of Greek, better than it
was written by any other people in western Europe.
They
maintained the same method of education till the
sixteenth century.
In the year 1571, centuries after the
golden age of Irish learning, amid the many misfortunes
that had fallen on the country, Edmund Campion found
Irish schools for law and medicine in operation, where
Latin was still employed as a living tongue : "They speake
Latine like a vulgar tongue, learned in their common
schools of leach-craft and law, whereat they begin (as)
children and hold on sixteene or twenty yeares, conning
by roate the Aphorisms of Hypocrates and the Civill In-
stitutions and a few other parings of these two faculties." 2
The long course of sixteen to twenty years indicates that
Ireland in eclipse still held to her ideal of thoroughness in
education.
Testimony as to the high and uniform level of education
among the medieval Irish people is likewise afforded
by the fact of the uniformity of the language. Old Irish
differs considerably from the modern form of the lan-
guage, but there were, as far as we can judge, no dialects
in it. The same language was spoken and written in the
Decies as in Tyrconnell, from the most southerly point of
Ireland to the most northerly part of Scotland. A Gaelic
book written in the sixth or ninth century would be under-
stood from Cape Clear to the remotest parts of Scotland.
The Irish in the "Book of Deir" is couched in the most
ancient form of Gaelic known to have been written in
Scotland and still existing. The Gaelic in this book was
probably written in the Abbey of Deir in Aberdeenshire
iKuno Meyer, Ancient Irish Poetry, Pref.
2 "Account of Ireland," p. 18.
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