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Transmitting Treasures of Ancient Learning
sixteenth century were no more educated men than the
men she sent in the nineteenth and sends in the twentieth.
It is not likely that in days when not one Englishman
in a hundred could read or write that these emissaries
of barbarism would be able to discriminate between an
Irish and a Latin manuscript. To them they were both
Greek. Unlike "ye sinfulle jewelles" they were not car-
ried away or transmuted, but blindly destroyed. Had the
Irish manuscripts, the Hiberno-Latin and the Hiberno-
Greek manuscripts, now peacefully reposing in Switzer-
land and elsewhere, had the libraries of Bobbio, Rebais,
Fleury and St. Gall, been in Ireland, to-day hardly
a vestige of them would remain. Had Johannes Scotus
Eriugena, the greatest thinker in the West or East from
Augustine to Aquinas, written his books at home in
Ireland, they would have been destroyed and we would
never have known of his existence. We can measure the
loss to civilization now; we could not have measured it
then. The psalm-singing Englishman has been able to
give the heathen Vandal lessons in vandalism.
For these reasons the work of the people of Ireland in
the medieval age cannot be judged by the standards in
respect to number and quality of existing monuments as
in other lands. In no other land has there been a foreign
government established in power interested in the destruction
of the memorials and monuments of the national
civilization. The Romans when they conquered Greece
did not destroy Greek architecture or Greek literature.
But the English in Ireland decided that the spoliation
and abasement of the Irish nation was a necessary condi-
tion of their own aggrandizement. We have to realize
therefore that the literary monuments that have come
down to us from medieval Ireland, noble and interesting
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