But he lived in the days before textual criticism. We cannot credit the Church as a whole with disinterested love of literature and its encouragement. But in every age there have been men within its fold who were passionately devoting themselves to authorship on their own account, and to the preservation of books and MSS., and literary lore of the past. Every monastery in the Middle Ages was thus more or less a place in which reading and writing were cultivated, and some were active centres of literary work. So that indirectly, and especially in troublous times, we owe to the Church the splendid heritage of a Gaelic literature continuous from the days of St. Patrick and St Columba to our own. Down to very recent times, in fact, the men connected with religious institutions have been the real custodiers, if not always themselves the authors, of Gaelic productions. Thus it was Maelmuiri in Clonmacnois that enriched posterity with the wonderful Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, while his contemporary did for the hymns in the _Liber Hymnorum_ what he so bravely and intelligently did for the sagas. From their time the fatuous hostility to the sagas had evidently broken down. Perhaps the Dialogues between Ossian and Patrick had been as effective in their own way in pouring ridicule and contempt upon the opposing faction as the poems of Burns in withering the hyper-orthodox tyranny of later times. At any rate, from the monasteries of Ireland in these Middle Ages came the great books of sagas and romance, such as the Books of Leinster, Ballymote, Lecain, Lismore, etc.; and in Scotland in the corresponding period we have the Glenmasan MS. of the thirteenth century; MS. XL. of the fourteenth; and, besides others, the great Book of the Dean of Lismore, which covers the period down almost to the Reformation in Scotland. But with the Reformation the old spirit of mistaken evangelical zeal against the ancient heroic literature seems to have revived in an aggressive form, for we find no less a man than Bishop Carswell, the most representative Churchman in the Highlands of that age, inveighing against the popularity of the sagas. In the epistle to the reader, which he prefixed to Knox’s Liturgy, the first book printed in Gaelic, he says:—