(5) More distinguishable and pronounced effects upon the literature of western Europe were produced by a backward invasion of the Celtic themes and temperament. There was much Celtic blood in northern Italy and in Spain, still more in France and the British Islands. When once the Celtic temperament emerged in literature it was sure of a ready and wide response. Perhaps no such emergence would have happened if it had not been that in the Dark Ages the Christian scholars—the only authors of that epoch—were especially cultured and ardent in Wales and Ireland. The racial and patriotic feelings of the British Celts were pathetic and intense, and, whether among those in western Britain, or among the emigrants to Brittany, the exploits of their race were celebrated in song marked by a high spirit of pride, as well as by a peculiar mysticism and a remarkable sentiment of chivalry and romance. The actual contributions of the Celts to our own literary making are the subject of brief remark elsewhere. (6) The influence of the East during the period before the first Renaissance was of no small importance. The language through which it came, but not often the language in which it originated, was the Arabic of the Saracens, whether as invaders of Spain or of Sicily. It is precisely while the literary state of Europe was at its lowest that the Saracenic culture was at its height. Into Spain, where the Moors had established themselves in splendour and opulence, there followed all the learning of the Semitic East, in philosophy, natural science, and medicine, together with the literary forms of the Arabs and the music of their accompaniments. Though the western Saracens were politically altogether separate from the Caliphate of Bagdad, the literary language was common to the Moslem world, and men of learning and artistic gift—whether Arabs or Jews—were equally welcome at either end. In the reign of Abd-ur-Rahman, in the early part of the tenth century, there particularly flourished in Moorish Spain the light verse of love and its gay surroundings. Meanwhile Cordova developed what was practically a University, to which congregated all manner of Oriental talent, and in which studies in science and philosophy were prosecuted with zeal. Nor was the diffusion of all this culture restricted to the Arabs or their Spanish subjects. Many Christians from other parts of western Europe sought a knowledge of mathematics or medicine at Cordova, nor were these severer accomplishments all that the visitor would acquire.