the best interests of literature, we may remark his defence of the bards at the Assembly of Drumceitt. Poets, historians, law‐givers, and genealogists, the bards represented all the learning of a past age and system; and if their arrogance now and then overstepped the bounds of courtesy, and even sometimes the restraints of law, in the main their institute was heroic and praiseworthy. Columba argued against their opponent, a prince of the Nialls of the South, Aedh, that “care must be taken not to pull up the good corn with the tares, and that the general exile of the poets would be the death of a venerable antiquity, and that of a poetry which was dear to the country and useful to those who knew how to employ it.” His eloquence saved the bardic institute, and the poets in their gratitude composed a famous song in his praise, which became celebrated in Irish literature under the name of _Ambhra_, or _Praise of S. Columbkill_.(45) Columbanus, a monk of Bangor, was destined to found an Irish colony of even greater fame and longer duration than Iona. Luxeuil, founded in 590, at the foot of the Vosges in Burgundy, soon counted among its sons many hundred votaries of learning. Montalembert says of it that “no monastery of the West had yet shone with so much lustre or attracted so many disciples”. It became another Lerins, a nursery of bishops for the Frankish and Burgundian cities, a notable seat of secular knowledge, and, above all, a school of saints. Indeed, among the meagre, skeleton‐like details that come down to us of these giant abodes of a supernatural race of men, we find ourselves perforce repeating over and over the same formula of commendation. What more could one say but that each of these monastic centres was a school of saints? And yet how much variety in that sameness! How much that even we can see, and distinguish, and mentally dissect! We see some soaring spirit, whose burning love is never content with renunciation, but ever seeks, with holy restlessness, some deeper solitude in which to pray and meditate, like the Bavarian monk Sturm, the pupil and companion of S. Boniface, and the founder of the world‐renowned Abbey of Fulda; or, again, some great thinker like Alcuin of York, whose touching love for his own land and city makes us feel with pardonable pride how near akin is our own weak human nature to that of even the giant men of old; or spirits like the gentle Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, the traditions of whose unwearied moderation and “inestimable gift of kindness and light‐heartedness,” as well as his “intense and active sympathy for those human sorrows which in all ages are the same,” are all the more precious to us that they are also mingled with tales of his wondrous horsemanship, athletic frame, and simple enjoyment of legitimate sports. The same author we have just quoted, Montalembert, says that the description of his childhood reads like that of a little Anglo‐Saxon of our own day, a scholar of Eton or Harrow.