To the gleaners of the poetic heritage of the past we are indebted almost as much as to the poets themselves; for what mattered it to us that some Homer or Ossian had sung, if none of their contributions ever reached us? An unappreciative age may allow its masterpieces to be lost, but the gleaners will not suffer that. They treasure the best, many a time snatching the fugitive poems from the verge of oblivion. Sometimes they glean for the pure pleasure of possessing, as the miser amasses his gold. Often they do it to share with others. In any case, like the middlemen of commerce, they are the true distributers, for sooner or later their wares reach the market. Unlike that of the poet, the work of the gleaner demands no originality; only a certain devotion and enthusiasm for the compositions admired, and a certain critical judgment, the latter not always in evidence, and not necessarily indispensable. Posterity does the winnowing. To the gleaners we owe the original compiling of the three most precious relics of Celtic literature now in the world—the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, the Book of Hymns, and the Book of Leinster. It is away back in the latter end of the eleventh century and early part of the twelfth that we encounter the authors of these. When the gloom of the Middle Ages was settling down upon Europe, and weird apparitions hovered round the camp fires and the cloisters; when the feudal lords were building their strong castles and the men of peace their churches and monastic retreats, to escape from war and disorder and general wickedness, one might enter the precincts of the great monastery of Clonmacnois in Ireland and find Maelmuiri, the son of the son of Conn nam Bocht, busy with his pen compiling the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre. Many times already had the sacred edifice been attacked and pillaged by the marauding Norsemen, and even then it was surrounded by people rendered violent and half savage by the disorders of the time, so that the studious Maelmuiri with his literary tastes was not secure in his quiet retreat, but in the midst of his peaceful avocations was set upon one night in the church and murdered by a band of robbers, to whom literature, most likely, had no meaning. But Maelmuiri had already reared his monument, more lasting than brass, in the book which happily escaped the hands of the ruffians. It is the oldest miscellaneous gleaning we have, and contains, among many valuable productions in prose and poetry, such ancient poems as Dallan Forgaill’s “Amra” or “Praise of Columcille,” and a pretty large transcript of the “Táin Bó Chuailgné.” The Gaelic of the former in the Fenian dialect was so ancient even in Maelmuiri’s time that it had to be heavily glossed and commented upon.