Irishmen were equally active in spreading secular knowledge. Indeed the two functions were generally combined; for it was quite common to find a man a successful missionary, while at the same time acting as professor in a college, or as head of some great seminary for general education. Irish professors and teachers were in those times held in such estimation that they were employed in most of the schools and colleges of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. The revival of learning on the Continent was indeed due in no small degree to those Irish missionaries. It was enough that the candidate for an appointment came from Ireland: he needed no other recommendation. When learning had declined in England in the ninth and tenth centuries, owing to the devastations of the Danes, it was chiefly by Irish teachers it was kept alive and restored. In Glastonbury especially, they taught with great success. We are told by English writers that “they were skilled in every department of learning sacred and profane”; and that under them were educated many young English nobles, sent to Glastonbury with that object. Among these students the most distinguished was St. Dunstan, who, according to all his biographers, received his education, both Scriptural and secular, from Irish masters there. As for the numerous Continental schools and colleges in which Irishmen figured either as principals or professors, it would be impossible, with our limited space, to notice them here. A few have been glanced at in the last chapter; and I will finish this short narrative by relating the odd manner in which two distinguished Irishmen, brothers, named Clement and Albinus,[4] began their career on the Continent. One of the historians of the reign of Charlemagne, who wrote in the ninth century, has left us the following account of these two scholars:--When the illustrious Charles began to reign alone in the western parts of the world, and literature was almost forgotten, it happened that two Scots from Ireland came over with some British merchants to the shores of France, men incomparably skilled in human learning and in the Holy Scriptures. Observing how the merchants exhibited and drew attention to their wares, they acted in a similar fashion to force themselves into notice like the others. They went through the market-place among the crowds, and cried out to them:--“If there be any who want wisdom (_i.e._, learning), let them come to us, for we have it to sell.” This they repeated as they went from place to place, so that the people wondered very much; and some thought them to be nothing more than persons half crazed.