There is no evidence that the northern Picts had a knowledge of letters before Columba taught them. There is even doubt as to what language these tribes spoke. Yet in 710 A.D., a little more than a hundred years after his death, a knowledge of letters was common in Pictland. With reference to subsequent ecclesiastical changes, it is known that King Naitan sent a proclamation “by public command throughout all the provinces of the Picts to be transcribed, learned, and observed.” This we have on the authority of Bede, a statement which shows that learning must have made considerable progress among the people even at that early date. So that in this respect we may very well endorse the opinion of Professor Mackinnon, when he says that “we have not yet perhaps fully realised the part which the School of Iona had in shaping the destinies of the Scottish nation.” When in Scotland we discuss the past history of our national education, the figure of John Knox invariably rises before us as prime inaugurator of the first real system, but the great Abbot of Iona was at it 1000 years before him. Shaping the destinies of the Scottish nation; ay, and might we not add of literature? For a further striking claim has been repeatedly put forward on behalf of the Celtic poets in the Columban period, namely this, that they taught Europe to rhyme. And this claim has been made not so much by partisans as by some of the foremost European scholars, including Zeuss and Nigra, who have remarked and pointed out that the Latin verses of Columcille and other early saints, either rhyme or have a strong tendency to rhyme. Referring to the advance towards final assonance in later times made by the English in their Latin poems, Zeuss says, “We must believe that this form was introduced among them by the Irish, as were the arts of writing and of painting and of ornamenting manuscripts, since they themselves, in common with the other Germanic nations, made use in their poetry of nothing but alliteration.” It is only some 500 years after Columba that we find rhyme beginning to appear in English literature. The other foreign writer of note, C. Nigra, with equal emphasis asserts that “final assonance or rhyme can have been derived only from the laws of Celtic phonology.” Meanwhile this must be regarded as a moot point. For other eminent scholars, Thurneysen and Windisch, have professed their opinion that it may be traced to the Latin. But “this at least is clear,” observes Dr. Hyde, who has gone very carefully into the matter, “that already in the seventh century the Irish not only rhymed, but made intricate Deibhidh and other rhyming metres, when for centuries after this period the Germanic nations could only alliterate.”