It is very difficult to say what was exactly the curriculum of the early Irish colleges, and how far they were patronised by laymen. Without doubt their original design was to propagate a more perfect knowledge of the Scriptures and of theological learning in general, but it is equally certain that they must have, almost from the very first, taught the heathen classics and the Irish language side by side with the Scriptures and theology. There is no other possible way of accounting for the admirable scholarship of the men whom they turned out, and for their skill in Latin and often also in Irish poetry. Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and most of the Latin poets must have been widely taught and read. "It is sufficient," says M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, talking of Columbanus who was born in 543, and who was educated at Bangor, on Belfast Loch, "to glance at his writings, immediately to recognise his marvellous superiority over Gregory of Tours and the Gallo-Romans of his time. He lived in close converse with the classical authors, as later on did the learned men of the sixteenth century, whose equal he certainly is not, but of whom he seems a sort of precursor." From the sixth to the sixteenth century is a long leap, and no higher eulogium could be passed upon the scholarship of Columbanus and the training given by his Irish college.[1] All the studies of the time appear to have been taught in them through the medium of the Irish language, not merely theology but arithmetic, rhetoric, poetry, hagiography, natural science as then understood, grammar, chronology, astronomy, Greek, and even Hebrew. "The classic tradition," sums up M. Darmesteter, "to all appearances dead in Europe, burst out into full flower in the Isle of Saints, and the Renaissance began in Ireland 700 years before it was known in Italy. During three centuries Ireland was the asylum of the higher learning which took sanctuary there from the uncultured states of Europe. At one time Armagh, the religious capital of Christian Ireland, was the metropolis of civilisation." "Ireland," says Babington in his "Fallacies of Race Theories,"[2] "had been admitted into Christendom and to some measure of culture only in the fifth century. At that time Gaul and Italy enjoyed to the full all the knowledge of the age. In the next century the old culture-lands had to turn for some little light and teaching to that remote and lately barbarous land."