At so short a distance from the shores of Roman Britain, it is not likely that the Irish remained letterless till the fifth century of the Christian era. It is almost certain that the labours of St. Patrick (about the middle of that century) were but complementary to those of earlier missionaries; and that the adoption of the Roman alphabet in Ireland may be dated from the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century. The consummate ornamental beauty of the MSS. executed in Ireland during the seventh century, and the testimony given by St. Adamnan (writing about A.D. 670) to the expertness of St. Columba as a calligrapher (about 550) tend to prove that the art had been practised for a long time before it attained to such excellence. The particular merit of the Irish is that they seem to have developed (out of Roman semi-uncials) a handsome minuscule form of writing earlier than any other people. The cursive of the Romans had always been an ugly and ill-decipherable script; and it was only in the seventh century that even the Italians, under barbarian pressure, evolved a fairly good readable minuscule. The minuscules of Gaul and Western Germany, called Merowingian, were still in a formless and primitive rudeness at the time when the Irish had already attained the elegance of practised penmanship. The Goths have next to be mentioned, as they and the Irish were the only two barbarian nations that adopted the Græco-Roman alphabet before the break-up of the Roman empire. _The Goths and Germans_