It is with the great wave of Christian evangelisation that passed over Ireland and Scotland successively, through the labours of St. Patrick and St. Columba, that the use of the Roman script became widely general, and we trace the dawn of letters. Round the names of these two men there shines a lustre which the lapse of ages has failed to dim. They not only kindled the torch of a higher faith and purer life among their Celtic brethren, but they lighted also the lamp of literature, which has continued to burn with more or less radiance for 1500 years. St. Patrick, as the earlier of the two, is really the Cædmon of Gaelic literature. Born in Scotland, probably, as the later critics think, at Old Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, he was, while yet a youth of sixteen, carried captive to Hiberio, and though he escaped after six years from his hard fate as his master’s thrall and feeder of cattle, his missionary zeal, new kindled, urged him to return as evangelist to the land of his former oppression. The visions of his early captivity, as he lay down to rest of nights near the cattle, remind us of Cædmon’s vision in the stable at Whitby, upwards of two hundred years after—a vision which issued in the birth of English literature, as did those of St Patrick in that of Gaelic. And so the unassuming herd emerges as the first known writer of the ancient Celtic people, the first of whom we have any definite authentic knowledge. Three literary compositions stand in his name, namely, his “Confession,” written in rugged Latin, his “Epistle to Coroticus,” in similar language and style, and the “Deer’s Cry,” a lorica or prayer in Gaelic. This hymn has always been regarded, and rightly too, as a gem of sacred song. The religious and literary dawn that lit up Ireland in the fifth century reached Scotland in the sixth through the advent of the heroic Columba. He too, by unhappy circumstances driven over sea, lived an exile in “the land of his adoption tried,” and with even more brilliance and learning did for Scotland what St. Patrick did for Ireland. So that the school of Iona became for centuries after his death a centre of light and leading in religion and letters, not only for Scotland and Ireland, but also for many parts of Europe. His own special contributions to literature include several beautiful poems in Gaelic and Latin, and many transcripts in Latin of parts of books of Scripture, such as the Cathrach, a copy of the Psalter believed to have been made while he was yet a student, and perhaps also the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells—two wonderful specimens of penmanship and early Celtic art. If these latter are not exactly the work of his own hands they belong at least to the Columban period, an era of great literary activity, which produced, among other well-known works, the _Amra Choluimcille_ of Dallan Forgaill, Adamnan’s _Life of Columba_, and the Book of Deer.