Only a scholar can know the pleasure it gives to hap upon a long-lost relic of literature, to turn over its leaves, steeping the book in water, if need be, to make its pages come asunder, and even using acid to help the time-worn ancient one to deliver up its secret. “Why bother with such defunct lore?” asks the man in the crowd, “the past is over and gone. It is long since superseded.” Therein lies the difference between him and the scholar. The scholar thinks it worth while. Nay, he will sacrifice much—we shall repeatedly see—to search out the contribution of the past, and determine its meaning. As Plato, Aristotle, and the master-minds of ancient Greece wrote their books and carried on their studies, knowing full well that these would be read and assimilated by very few in their own day, there being no printing-presses as now, and only a limited education; so many of the Celtic scholars of our own time labour on in solitude, conscious also that even with the printing-press the circle of their readers must be small, yet knowing they are doing a work which in its own way is ever widening the horizons of knowledge and enriching the common heritage of mankind. In the bards and seanachies, there have not been lacking from remote times men who have interested themselves in the lore and learning of their race; but we need to come down to more recent times to encounter the class of writers we have specially in view in this study. Happily, they are not confined to any one age or any one country. Yet Ireland, as we might expect from its place in the Celtic group, figures early and largely in the domain of Gaelic scholarship. During the first half of the seventeenth century—to go no farther back—it produced six men of outstanding literary eminence, who represented a national scholarship in that country, the lustre of which has never since been surpassed. These were Geoffrey Keating, Duald Mac Firbis, and the Four Masters. Keating, though born in Ireland, was of Norman extraction, and educated abroad for the office of priest. On his return from Spain, a full-fledged Doctor of Divinity, he was appointed to a church and attracted great crowds as a preacher, till an incident, the most trivial and fortuitous in its origin, drove him from the pulpit into literature. The incident is worth recording as a determining factor in his illustrious career. It seems that in his audience one day a young lady, who was reputed to have questionable relations with a high dignitary of the Province, happened to appear, curious, like all the rest, to hear the great preacher. Keating, as fate would have it, was discoursing on this occasion on a theme not likely to commend itself to the dissolute girl; still less, since all eyes pointed the moral in her direction.