Whatever exaggeration may have been committed by the national annalists when they speak of the foreign students who resorted to the Irish schools, it is impossible to doubt that they were eagerly sought by nations of the most distant lands, who, in an age when the rest of Europe was sunk in illiterate barbarism, found in the cloisters of Armagh, Lismore, Clonard, and Clonmacnois, masters of philosophy and sacred science whose learning had passed into a proverb. Camden remarks how common a thing it is to read in the lives of our English saints that they were sent to study in Ireland, and the same expression occurs quite as frequently in the Gallican histories. The prodigious Litany of the Saints, composed in the eighth century by St. Ængus, includes the names not only of Britons, Picts, and Saxons, but also of Gauls, Germans, Romans, and Egyptians, all buried in Ireland. The tomb of the “Seven Romans” may still be seen in the churchyard of St. Brecan in the Isle of Aran, and a church at Meath was commonly known as the Greek Church, so called from having been served by Greek ecclesiastics. Even in the eleventh century the fame of the Irish schools was undiminished, and Sulgenus, bishop of St. David’s, spent ten years studying under their best masters. Great as was the learning of the Irish scholars, it had in it a certain character of its own. Their theology was deeply tinged with a metaphysical spirit, and in their grammar, no less than their poetry, they displayed a taste for the mystic and the obscure. This is partly to be attributed to the influence of the Toulouse academicians, with whom the Irish scholars eagerly fraternised. They seem to have found something unspeakably attractive in the bizarre language of the twelve Latinities and the novelties of the Toulouse prosody. The strange jargon in which some of their professors were accustomed to indulge occasionally steals into the Hibernian hymns and antiphons; and the Anglo-Saxons who flocked in such multitudes to the Irish seminaries, were not slow in catching the infection. They soon learnt to disfigure their pages with a jumble of Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon syllables, and to expend their patience and ingenuity over compositions in which the great achievement was to produce fifteen consecutive words beginning with a P.