The Irishmen Sedulius and John Scotus Eli seo*, who flourished in the middle of the 9th century, were good Hellenists. The latter was the most learned man of his day in Greek and, at the request of Charles the Bald, translated from Greek into Latin for the newly founded Abbey of Saint Denis the apocryphal works of Dionysus the Pseudo-Areopagite, a feat that probably no other scholar in western Europe was capable of performing. He also wrote whole verses in Greek and seems to have read Plato's in the original. Even as late gs the 10th century, when education had fallen* very low in Ireland, we find King Cormac, Abbot-Bishop of Cashel, praised for his knowl edge of Irish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon and Norse.
A few Heilenisms are also found in the writ ings' of Colitmcille and Adamnan. In the (Antra, or hymn of praise in honor of the former saint, composed by Dalian Forgall, he Is said 'to have conversed with an angel; he spoke in Greek grammar" ' • which is glossed: that is, he made conversation with an angel, and he learnt grammar like Greeks; or, he con versed grammatically and in Greek.' And one of die manuscripts containing his life by Adam van, now at Schaffhausen and dating from the is remarkable for the use of Greek character; in the colophon, and more especially in the copy of the Lord's Prayer which it con 'tains. According to the life of Saint Brendan, it Iva; required by the keeper of the church of Saint -Gildas in Wales "to sing the Mass from a missal written in Greek • characters.' In the great Irish libraries at. Bdbbio and Reichenau copies of such Greek authors as Aristotle and Demosthenes have been preserved, some of them with Irish glosses showing that they were used by Irish students and that Greek formed part of their curriculum. There are besides, Greek-Latin glossaries and paradigms of Greek declension, written by Irishmen in the 9th cent tury, Greek words transcribed into Irish, that is with the Irish spelling, Greek biblical texts and Greek-Latin manuscripts of the psalms, one of which is ascribed to Sedulius Scottus, a Greek G text of the Epistles of Saint Paul, a reek text of the Four Gospels, the last two with inter linear Latin translations.
Many more instances might be cited to show that a lcnowledge of Greek existed in the early schools of Ireland, With the exception of a few conspicuous cases, however, that knowledge was not characterized by accuracy of scholar ship or by a wide acquaintance with Greek liter ature. But enough has been said to prove that
it was much more than an acquaintance with the Greek alphabet and a few technical terms and quotations picked up at second hand and pep pered here and there in his Latin text to en hance the writer's reputation for learning. Greek survived in Ireland long after it had al most perished in the rest of Europe and wher ever we hear of anyone knowing Greek in France or still more in Germany in the course of the 9th century he was almost certainly an Irishman or had gone to school to one.
The fame of the Irish schools for their teachers, their libraries and their system of education, all of which was far in advance of what was current at that day, attracted not only native students, but also great numbers from abroad who, coming to Ireland to complete their education, 'brought with them the manners and customs, and the learning, such as it was, of their native lands, so that while Ireland was giving of her best she was constantly receiving fresh elements of strength from without. The