especially to refute the commonly assigned date of our Saviour's birth as fixed by the Dionysian computation, which he affirms is twenty-two years behind the proper date. For this, though he is not followed by modern chronologists, he certainly won the applause of his mediæval contemporaries. Unfortunately these two books have not yet been published; but the "Third Book" has been published by the learned Waitz in the fifth volume of _Pertz's Historical Monuments of Germany_. It has been since republished in _Migne's Latin Patrology_, volume 147, where it can be more readily consulted by Irish scholars. The work extends from the birth of Christ to the year A.D. 1081; the following year A.D. 1082 the writer ended a life full of good works, glorious for God, and for his country. He sleeps, like many another Irish saint, far away from the green hills of Ireland; but he sleeps well with kindred dust in the monastery of St. Martin of Mayence, and posterity has honoured, with the name of "the Blessed," Marianus Scotus, the latest glory of the School of Moville. CHAPTER XII. THE SCHOOL OF CLONMACNOISE. "Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo." --_Jeremias._ I.--ST. CIARAN OF CLONMACNOISE. How solitary now she sits by the great river that once thronged City! Her gates are broken, and her streets are silent. Yet in olden time she was a queen, and the children of many lands came to do her homage. She was the nursing mother of our saints, and the teacher of our highest learning for a long six hundred years. The most ancient and the most accurate of the Annals of Erin were written in her halls; the most learned 'Doctors of the Scots' lectured in her classrooms; the sweetest of our old Gaedhlic poems were composed by her professors; the noblest youth of France and England crowded her halls, and bore the renown of her holiness and learning to foreign lands. Even still her churches, her crosses, and her tombstones furnish the best and most characteristic specimens of our ancient Celtic art in sculpture and in architecture. View it as you may, Clonmacnoise was the greatest of our schools in the past, as it is the most interesting of our ruins in the present.