“The conquest of Britain,” writes the Rev. J. R. Green (“History of the English People,” p. 16[53]), “had thrust a wedge of heathendom into the heart of the Western Church. On the one side lay Italy and Gaul, whose Churches owned obedience to the see of Rome, on the other the free Celtic Church of Ireland. But the condition of the two portions of Western Christendom was very different. While the vigour of Latin Christianity was exhausted in a bare struggle for life, Ireland as yet unscourged by invaders had drawn from its conversion an energy such as it has never known since. Christianity had been received there with a burst of popular enthusiasm. Letters and arts sprang up rapidly in its train; the science and Biblical knowledge which had fled from the continent took refuge in famous schools which made Durrow and Armagh the universities of the West. The new life soon beat too strongly to brook confinement within insular bounds. Patrick, the first missionary of Ireland, had not been half a century dead, when Celtic Christianity flung itself with a fiery zeal into battle with the mass of heathenism which had rolled in upon the Christian world. Irish missionaries laboured among the Picts of the Highlands, among the Frisians of the northern seas; Columban founded monasteries in Burgundy and the Apennines; the canton of St. Gall still commemorates in its name the missionary before whom the spirits of flood and fell fled wailing over the waters of the Lake of Constance. For a time it seemed as if the course of the world’s history was to be changed, as if the older race that Roman and Teuton had swept before them had turned to the moral conquest of its conquerors, as if Celtic and not Latin Christianity was to mould the destinies of the Churches of the West.” It is impossible that Irish-Celtic art should not have made itself felt wherever the Irish missionaries penetrated, and especially in the gorgeous illuminated Gospels, which it was the pride of S. Columban and his school to have made, and which now excite our wonder and admiration. The early Christian art in Ireland grew out of the late Celtic, and was, to a great extent, free from the influence of Rome, which is stamped on the Brit-Welsh art of the same age in this country. The style, therefore, of these circular brooches, from its correspondence with that of the Irish illuminated gospels, affords reasonable grounds for the belief that the Victoria Cave was inhabited in the sixth century, or possibly later, but before the English invaders had swept the Brit-Welsh away from the district.