a fresh impulse from the new faith. A flourishing primitive
Christian literature arose. The national language was employed not only
for the purposes of instruction and devotion, in tombstone or other
inscriptions, but also in religious prose and poetry, and, still more
remarkable, in learned writings. There can, I think, be little doubt that
we should hardly have any early records of Anglo-Saxon literature if the
English had not in the first instance received Christianity from the
Irish. It had been the influence and example of those Irish missionaries
who converted Northumberland that taught the Anglian monk to preserve and
cultivate his national literature.
Ireland had become the heiress of the classical and theological learning
of the Western Empire of the third and fourth centuries, and a period of
humanism was thus ushered in which reached its culmination during the
sixth and following centuries, the Golden Age of Irish civilisation. The
charge that is so often levelled against Irish history, that it has been,
as it were, in a backwater, where only the fainter wash of the larger
currents reaches, cannot apply to this period. For once, at any rate,
Ireland drew upon herself the eyes of the whole world, not, as so often
in later times, by her unparalleled sufferings, but as the one haven of
rest in a turbulent world overrun by hordes of barbarians, as the great
seminary of Christian and classical learning, 'the quiet habitation of
sanctity and literature,' as Doctor Johnson called her in a memorable
letter written to Charles O'Connor. Her sons, carrying Christianity and a
new humanism over Great Britain and the Continent, became the teachers of
whole nations, the counsellors of kings and emperors. For once, if but for
a century or two, the Celtic spirit dominated a large part of the Western
world, and Celtic ideals imparted a new life to a decadent civilisation
until they succumbed, not altogether to the benefit of mankind, before a
mightier system--that of Rome.
It was during this period that the oral literature, handed down by many
generations of bards and story-tellers, was first written down in the
monasteries. Unfortunately, not a single tale, only two or three poems,
have come down to us from these early centuries in contemporary
manuscripts. In Ireland nearly all old MSS. were destroyed during the
Viking terror which burst upon the island at the end of the eighth
century.[1] But, from the eleventh century on
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