When we remember that the darkness of the Middle Ages had already set in over the struggles, agony, and confusion of feudal Europe, and that all knowledge of Greek may be said to have died out upon the Continent--"had elsewhere absolutely vanished," says M. Darmesteter--when we remember that even such a man as Gregory the Great was completely ignorant of it, it will appear extraordinary to find it taught in Ireland alone, out of all the countries of Western Europe.[3] Yet this is capable of complete and manifold proof. Columbanus for instance, shows in his letter to Pope Boniface that he knows something of both Greek and Hebrew.[4] Aileran, who died of the plague in 664, gives evidence of the same in his book on our Lord's genealogy. Cummian's letter to the Abbot of Iona has been referred to before, and, as Professor G. Stokes puts it, "proves the fact to demonstration that in the first half of the seventh century there was a wide range of Greek learning, not ecclesiastical merely, but chronological, astronomical, and philosophical, away at Durrow in the very centre of the Bog of Allen." Augustine, an un-identified Irish monk of the second half of the seventh century, gives many proofs of Greek and Oriental learning and quotes the Chronicles of Eusebius. The later Sedulius, the versatile abbot of Kildare, about the year 820 "makes parade of his Greek knowledge," to quote a French writer in the "Revue Celtique," "employs Greek words without necessity, and translates into Greek a part of the definition of the pronoun."[5] St. Caimins's Psalter, seen by Bishop Ussher with the Hebrew text collated, convinced Dr. Reeves that Hebrew as well as Greek was studied in Ireland about the year 600. Nor did this Greek learning tend to die out. In the middle of the ninth century John Scotus Erigena, summoned from Ireland to France by Charles the Bald, was the only person to be found able to translate the Greek works of the pseudo-Dionysius,[6] thanks to the training he had received in his Irish school. The Book of Armagh contains the Lord's Prayer written in Greek letters, and there is a Greek MS. of the Psalter, written in Sedulius' own hand, now preserved in Paris. Many more Greek texts, at least a dozen, written by Irish monks, are preserved elsewhere in Europe. "These eighth and ninth century Greek MSS.," remarks Professor Stokes, "covered with Irish glosses and Irish poems and Irish notes, have engaged the attention of palæographers and students of the Greek texts of the New Testament during the last two centuries." They are indeed a proof that--as Dr. Reeves puts it--the Irish School "was unquestionably the most advanced of its day in sacred literature."