In every college of Irish origin, by whomsoever they were founded or on whatever soil they flourished, we thus see study blended with the duties of the missionary and the cœnobite. They were religious houses, no doubt, in which the celebration of the Church office was often kept up without intermission by day and night; but they were also seminaries of learning, wherein sacred and profane studies were cultivated with equal success. Not only their own monasteries but those of every European country were enriched with their manuscripts, and the researches of modern bibliopolists are continually disinterring from German or Italian libraries a Horace, or an Ovid, or a Sacred Codex whose Irish gloss betrays the hand which traced its delicate letters. The Hibernian scholars were remarkable for combining acuteness of the reasoning powers with the gifts of the musician and the poet. There were no more accurate mathematicians and no keener logicians than the sons of Erin, whose love of syllogism is spoken of in the ninth century by St. Benedict of Anian. They are admitted to have been the precursors of the mediæval schoolmen, and to have been the first to apply the subtleties of Greek philosophy to Christian dogma. Their love of Greek was, perhaps, excessive, for they evinced it by Hellenising their Latin, and occasionally writing even their Latin missals in the Greek character. In the disputes that arose on the subject of the Paschal computation, they astonished their adversaries with their arithmetical science and their linguistic erudition. St. Cummian, in the Paschal epistle wherein he so ably defends the Roman system, examines all the various cycles in use among the Jews, Greeks, Latins, and Egyptians; quotes passages from Greek and Latin fathers, and manifestly proves how well the libraries of Ireland were furnished, and how competent her scholars were to use them. Nor whilst cultivating the exact sciences did they abandon the muses. Both St. Columbia and St. Columbanus enjoyed a reputation as poets. St. Ængus, the martyrologist, began life as a professional bard, and did not lay aside his harp when he assumed the cowl of the cœnobite; while Ruman, the son of Colman, was called “the Virgil of Ireland,” and is described as an “adept in chronology, history, and poetry.” Rhyme, if not invented in Ireland, was at least adopted by her versifiers so generally, and at so early a period, as sometimes to be designated “the art of the Irish;” and, as Moore observes, the peculiar structure of their verse shows that it belonged to a people of strong musical feeling. Hence they soon became famous for their skill in psalmody, and were esteemed both at home and abroad as first-rate choir-masters; and the legends of the Irish saints are full of passages which describe the kind of ecstasy produced in the minds of this people, so susceptible to the beautiful in every form, by the melody of the ecclesiastical chant. We will