If Ireland gave hospitality in these remote ages to men of all tongues and races, she in her turn sent forth her swarms of saints who have left their traces in countless churches founded by them in Gaul, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. The children of St. Columbanus reformed the Austrasian clergy, and were the first apostles of the Rhetian wildernesses. At Fiesole, in Tuscany, we find the Irish St. Donatus, compelled by the people to accept the office of bishop, and restoring, at one and the same time, sacred studies and ecclesiastical discipline. The myrtle bowers of Ausonia, however, did not make him forget his native land, for in some Latin verses which Moore has thought worthy of translation, he dwells like a true patriot on the praises of that remote western island, so rich in gems and precious metals, where the fields flow with milk and honey, and the lowing herds and golden harvests supply all the wants of man. At Lucca the English traveller is still startled to find the relics of his own Anglo-Saxon countrymen, St. Richard and St. Winibald, preserved and venerated in a church dedicated to the Irish bishop, St. Frigidian. And whilst the southern shores of Italy were welcoming the coming of St. Cataldus, Iceland and the distant Orcades were receiving missionaries of the same Celtic race.[46] Hereafter we shall see the scholars of Ireland taking part in the Carlovingian revival of learning, and making it their boast that the two first universities of Europe, those of Paris and Pavia, owed their foundation in no small degree to Hibernian professors. But before that era dawned, they had found rivals, both in their literary and apostolic labours, in the Anglo-Saxon race. The “sea-dragons of Germany,” who had extinguished faith and civilisation in the British provinces which they had overrun and conquered, had received anew those precious gifts from the hands of a great pope, whose instinctive genius led him to transfer to this remote corner of the world the sciences which were fast dying out of the Italian and Gallican schools. The story has been often told, but the course of our history obliges us to tell it over again in the following chapter. _CHAPTER III._ THE ANGLO-SAXON SCHOOLS. A.D. 590 TO 875.