families at least were within reach of literary education in the fourth century. His friend and teacher, Celestius, has also been claimed as an Irishman, but Dr. Healy has shown that this claim is perhaps founded upon a misconception.[2] "The influence of the ancient Irish on the Continent," says Dr. Sigerson, "began in the works of Sedulius, whose 'Carmen Paschale,' published in the fifth century, is the first great Christian epic worthy of the name." Sedulius, the Virgil of theological poetry, flourished in the first half of the fifth century, and seems to have studied in Gaul, passed into Italy, and finally resided in Achaia in Greece, which he seems to have made his home. There are at least eight Irish Siadals (in Latin Sedulius, in English Shiel) commemorated by Colgan. The strongest evidence of Sedulius's Irish nationality is that the Irish geographer Dicuil, in the eighth century, quoting some of his lines, calls him _noster Sedulius_. John of Tritenheim, towards the close of the fifteenth century, distinctly calls him an Irishman _natione Scotus_, but attributes to him the verses of a later Sedulius. Dr. Sigerson, by a clever analysis of his verse-peculiarities confirms this opinion.[3] In the "Tripartite Life of St. Patrick" we read that the druids at the king's court, when St. Patrick arrived there, possessed books, and when, at a later date, St. Patrick determined upon revising the Brehon law code, the books in which it was written down were laid before him. That there has come down to our time no written record earlier than the seventh or eighth century[4] is chiefly due to the enormous destruction of books by the Danes and English. The same causes produced a like effect in Britain, for the oldest surviving British MSS. are not even as old as ours, although the art of writing must have been known and practised there since the Roman occupation.