V. "May the most holy St. Michael The prince of angels defend us, Whom to conduct our souls heavenward God from the highest doth send us." The School of Moville during the subsequent centuries of disaster not only maintained its existence but produced one of the most distinguished of the mediæval historians, the celebrated Marianus Scotus, the chronicler, to be carefully distinguished from his namesake and contemporary, Marianus Scotus, a poet, theologian and commentator of Sacred Scripture, to whom we hope to refer on another occasion. II.--MARIANUS SCOTUS. Marianus Scotus, the Chronicler, was born, as he himself tells us, in the year A.D. 1028; but we know nothing of his family, or the place of his birth. Marianus is the smooth, latinized form of Maelbridge, the servant of St. Brigid, a favourite pre-nomen in ancient Ireland. He tells us, too, in his chronicle, that when he had on one occasion committed a slight fault, his preceptor Tighernagh Boirceach reminded him, how the abbot of Iniscaltra, an island in Lough Derg, had expelled a holy man from the Island and commanded him to leave Ireland for giving a little food to the brethren without permission. This shows that Tighernach Boirceach, Abbot of Moville for several years before his death in A.D. 1061, must have been the spiritual guide who reprimanded Marianus for his fault; whence we infer that Marianus spent his youth in the School of Moville. In A.D. 1056 he tells us--"I, Marianus, left my native country this year, having become a pilgrim for the kingdom of God." He came to Cologne and there entered the Monastery of St. Martin, at that time ruled by Irish abbots and containing a community of Irish monks. Two years later he went to Fulda, and "all unworthy as I am, I Marianus, was ordained priest with Sigfrid, Abbot of Fulda, nigh to the body of the blessed Martyr Kilian of Wurtzburg"--his countryman who had been like himself a pilgrim and died for Christ in a foreign land. There he became a recluse, shut up in his little cell for ten long years, given wholly to prayer, penance, and study. Every day during these ten years he offered the Holy Sacrifice over the tomb of his countryman, Anmchaidh, the same who was driven from Inniscaltra as a penance for his fault, and who died in A.D. 1043 in the odour of sanctity. From Fulda in A.D. 1069, he, the "wretched Marianus," was, as he tells us, transferred by order of the Abbot of Fulda and the Bishop of Mayence to that city, and there again, as he tells us in his sweet humility, he became once more a hermit for his sins. His learning, especially in history and chronology, was very extensive, and so by order of his superiors he wrote a Chronicle in Three Books, which is one of the most valuable memorials of mediæval learning that have come down to our times. The first two books are mainly devoted to questions of chronology in which the writer exhibits vast learning and great ingenuity. He labours