Of some books and fragments which concern matters not theological, it is hard to say whether they fall just within or just outside our period. Such are the medical receipts, the leechdoms and the descriptions of Eastern marvels already alluded to; such too the dream-books, the weather prognostics, the version of the story of Apollonius of Tyre. Byrhtferth of Ramsey, almost the only author of this class whose name has survived, wrote partly in Latin and partly in the vernacular upon "computus," Calendarial science, shortly before the year 1000, when he anticipates the loosing of Satan.
There was a time when it would have been proper to say that important remains of Welsh poetry far older than A.D. 1000 were in existence. That time is past, and it is recognised that the poems of Taliesin and the rest are not of the first age. Glosses and small fragments of verse are the oldest things we have in Welsh. Ireland has more, but of the documents – so far as they have not been noticed already – which bear on learning, a great many can only be dated by the linguistic experts, and unanimity is no more the rule among the scholars than among the politicians of the Celts.
There are, it has been said, Irish versions of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, of the Thebaid of Statius and of the Odyssey. To the first no date is assigned; it is not in print, and for all one can tell it may have been made from a printed edition; the second appears to be a medieval abstract in prose; the only published text that represents the third is a short prose tale. It has some traits (as of the dog of Odysseus recognising him) which are not derivable from Latin sources, and read like distorted recollections of the Greek; but the main course of the story is wholly un-Homeric. Nor is it claimed as falling within our period. I cite this as a specimen of exaggerations that are current. They are wholly uncalled for. Nobody doubts the reality of the ancient learning of Ireland. It is safe to predict that sober and critical research will not lessen but increase our sense of the debt which the modern world owes, first to Ireland and after her to Britain, as the preservers and transmitters of the wisdom of old time.
I end this chapter, as I began it, with these islands; and as I write, just such a storm hangs over them as that which, breaking, drove Alcuin from their shores eleven centuries ago; and just such destruction is being wrought in the old homes of learning, Corbie, and St Riquier, Laon and Rheims, as the Vikings wrought then. But the destroyers of to-day are no Vikings. They are, and the more is the pity, men of a race which has done a vast deal for learning; that has brought to light things new and old. They are undoing their own work now: they have robbed the world of beauties and delights that never can be given back. It will be long before any of the nations can forgive Germany; longer still, I earnestly hope, before she can forgive herself.
