It will thus be seen that the earliest written MSS. of the Celtic people are essentially a Christian literature, which ignored almost entirely the pagan traditions of the race in its effort to supersede them. But the atmosphere was heavy with these, and apparently from pre-Christian times there had come floating down by oral transmission a great mass of heroic saga which at length found written expression in the seventh or eighth century A.D. So that now to the purely Christian literature there was added the purely pagan, which much more faithfully reflected the characteristic flavour of the race, its strength, and its weakness, its facts, its fancies, and its foibles. Professing to go back to a remote antiquity, it is significant that the setting of this ancient saga is confined exclusively to these islands. None of the stories belong to Europe or the doings of the parent stock in its palmy days. As compared with the Christian, this pagan contribution is by far the more important from a literary point of view. Yet it must be borne in mind that though there are still extant in Ireland Celtic Latin MSS. which reach up to the time of St. Patrick and St. Columba, there is none existing which contains actual Gaelic writing prior to the eighth century. Almost the only specimen of continuous prose written by the end of the eighth century now known to exist is a portion of a Gaelic sermon on temperance and self-denial from the text, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” This curious relic is in the town library of Cambray, in a MS. containing the canons of an Irish council held in 684. The MS., however, bears direct evidence that it was not written until about a century afterwards. The earliest written Gaelic is contained in MSS. on the Continent, such as those at Milan, Cambray, Vienna, St. Gall, and other places. And even these are not books of saga, but generally Latin books with some Gaelic poems jotted on the leaf margins, or glosses, and other explanatory writing. There are a few such literary monuments also in the British Isles, containing ancient Gaelic. The Book of Armagh, for example, dates from 807, and in addition to vernacular notes, preserves the Latin “Confessions” of St. Patrick, copied, it is believed, from the apostle’s own autograph MS. The Book of Deer, almost equally venerable, with a Gaelic colophon, belongs to the same century. To its original contents were added in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Gaelic entries which are of uncommon philological and historical interest and value.