In recognition of the service rendered them on this occasion the bards appeared before Columba in a body, with Dallan Forgaill, their chief, at their head, bringing the famous “Amra” or elegy which the latter had composed in his praise. This poem is in the Fenian dialect, so ancient and obscure as to be very baffling and almost unintelligible to scholars. It has come down to us heavily annotated with gloss and commentary in the eleventh century MS. (Leabhar Na h’Uidhre). So far as can be made out, it speaks of the saint in relation to the people as “their soul’s light, their learned one, their chief from right, who was God’s messenger, who dispelled fears from them, who used to explain the truth of words, a harp without a base chord, a perfect sage who believed in Christ; he was learned, he was chaste, he was charitable, he was an abounding benefit of guests, he was eager, he was noble, he was gentle, he was the physician of the heart of every age; he was to persons inscrutable, he was a shelter to the naked, he was a consolation to the poor, there went not from the world one who was more continual for a remembrance of the cross.” But a recent writer, Dr. Strachan of Manchester, casts doubts upon the antiquity of its present form, thinking it belongs, as transcribed, to a later date. The other way in which St. Columba helped forward the cause of letters was by encouraging the scholars. The monasteries became great schools of learning as well as missionary centres. In all the institutions he founded, ample provision was made for the multiplication of books. The knowledge of Hebrew and Greek was fostered among the monks as well as of Latin and Gaelic. To the monastic houses founded throughout Pictland by the Columban clergy the tribes sent their youth to be trained. And for several centuries, as Skene has observed, there was not a Pictish boy taught his letters but received his education from a Columban monk. In later times students from the Continent flocked to the more famous of the Celtic seats of learning in Ireland and Scotland, and we even hear of Iona sending professors to Cologne, Louvain, and Paris.