According to our native records the art of writing was known to the pagan Irish, and the druids had books on law and other subjects, long before the time of St. Patrick. Besides these home evidences, which are so numerous and strong as hardly to admit of dispute, we have the testimony of a learned foreigner, which is quite decisive on the point. A Christian philosopher of the fourth century of our era, named Ethicus of Istria, travelled over the three continents, and has left a description of his wanderings, in what he calls a ‘Cosmography’ of the World. He visited Ireland more than a hundred years before the arrival of St. Patrick; and he states that he found there many books, and that he remained for some time in the country examining them. So far then as Ethicus records the existence of Irish books in the fourth century, he merely corroborates our own native accounts. The pagan Irish books were, of course, written in the Irish language; but as to the nature or shapes of the letters, or the form of the writing, or how it reached Ireland, on these points we have no information, for none of the old books remain. The letters used in these books could hardly have been what are known as Ogham characters, for these are too cumbrous for long passages. Ogham was a species of writing, the letters of which were formed by combinations of short lines and points, on and at both sides of a middle or stem line. Nearly all the Oghams hitherto found are sepulchral inscriptions. Great numbers of monumental stones are preserved with Ogham inscriptions cut on them, of which most have been deciphered, either partially or completely. They are in a very antique form of the Irish language; and while many were engraved in far distant pagan ages, others belong to Christian times. But whatever characters the Irish may have used in times of paganism, they learned the Roman letters from the early Roman missionaries, and adopted them in writing their own language during and after the time of St. Patrick: which are still retained in modern Irish. These same letters, moreover, were brought to Great Britain by the early Irish missionaries already spoken of (p. 52), from whom the Anglo-Saxons learned them; so that England received her first knowledge of the letters of the alphabet--as she received most of her Christianity--from Ireland. Formerly it was the fashion to call those letters Anglo-Saxon: but now people know better. Our present printed characters--the very characters now under the reader’s eye--were ultimately developed from those old Irish-Roman letters.