all countries. We need not, however, insist that the great body of the classical Latin literature which we now possess was preserved to us by the exertions either of the Irish or of the English, to whom the lamp of learning passed next in order. No doubt, whatever the Irish came across in the way of ancient literature they welcomed and treasured, but it is not to be supposed that they ever acquired in their native land a very large mass of such writings. It was when, impelled in the first instance by missionary zeal, and later by troubled conditions at home, they passed over in large numbers to the Continent, that they became instrumental in rescuing fragments of the literature which they had already learned to value. It is reserved for the palaeographers of the next few decades to shew how many of our Latin classics betray the existence of an "insular" stage in the line of their transmission. An important class of scribal errors is due to the fact that a copyist of the Middle Ages or of the Renaissance was using an archetype in "Scriptura Scottica," in the insular script, in which the peculiar forms, say, of r and s misled him. Sometimes these errors affect the whole body of manuscripts of a given author, and in these cases it is obvious that we owe the preservation of the text to an insular scribe. A leading instance, as Traube has shewn, is furnished by the History of Ammianus Marcellinus.
We shall have occasion to revert to the work of the Irish on the Continent. The time has now come for us to pass from Ireland to Great Britain. It will be worth while to inquire what, apart from vague modern panegyric, is to be known of the state of learning in the British Church before the coming of Theodore.
The small tract of the British bishop Fastidius is the only monument assignable to the fifth century. In the sixth we have the writings ascribed to Gildas, the Epistle, undoubtedly his, the Lorica, and the penitential Canons. We have, too, the Hisperica Famina. Little, if anything else, has been credited to Britons of this period. For any further information about the leading lights of the British Church we have to depend upon traditions committed to writing at a far later time, and in particular upon the lives of the saints, which are of exactly similar complexion with those of the Irish; embodying a modicum of fact wrapped in a sparkling tissue of wonders.
Fastidius may be dismissed with a word: he has no trait that can be identified as British. Gildas, as his Epistle attests, was a man of education. The writers whom we may credit him with having known are, indeed, not recondite, but they are of good quality: Virgil, Persius, Claudius (Claudian?), Jerome, Orosius, Rufinus. Such books as these, then, were accessible in Britain; was there more than this? The Epistle affords no evidence of the study of languages other than Latin; Greek and Hebrew words occur in the Lorica, but – whether this be of Gildas's composing or no – they need imply no more than the use of a glossary.
