we make a clean discovery which absolutely refutes the unneighbourly charges of more southern brethren in our own time which associate Celts, whisky, and idleness too closely and unfairly together. Our early Highland teachers inculcated industry and sobriety; the dangerous powers of whisky were unknown to them; and even the lighter inspirations of ale they eschewed until their own primitive virtues were undermined by contact with the beer-drinking Pagan Norse on the one hand, and in later times with the fiercer spirits which were imported from Teutonic fens on the other. Such are the strange reversals of popular opinions which accurate study of the facts of history unfolds. The alleged idleness of the Gael of the present day, does not appear thus to have any essential connection with the original sin of the race; the development of the quality appears to have taken place in contact with a more sluggish and a less lively people. In his great work on “English Writers,” Professor Henry Morley writes:—“When darkness gathered over all the rest of western Europe, the churches and monasteries of the British island, first among the Celts and afterwards among the English, supplied, says the Danish scholar [Professor Sophus Bugge], in and after the seventh century, the only shelter and home to the higher studies. The British clergy travelled far in search of books, until in the time of Charlemagne it was from the Church in Britain that the clearest light shone through the western world.” The devotional spirit by which these men were animated, will be fairly illustrated by the renderings of their Latin Hymns contained in this chapter.