Colman, Salust, Amor, Arno (who was brother to Alcuin, the great scholar), Murcherel (or, as some call him, Muricherodachus), Vimius, Zimius and Martinus.

In many respects one of the most remarkable of Irish workers for the faith in Germany was the Holy Marianus Scotus of Donegal-whose correct name was Muiredach MacRorty, a native of Tyrhugh in Donegal-who arrived in Germany only eleven years after Marianus the Chronicler, and who in 1076 founded a monastery which was to become famous, at Ratisbon-from which his Irish followers (who for ages after continued thronging there from Ireland) branched out and built many other notable monasteries in Germany and Austria-all of them under the jurisdiction of the Irish Monastery at Ratisbon. Some of these Irish sister monasteries were the monastery of Wurtzburg, Nuremberg, Constance, St. George in Vienna, St. Mary in Vienna and Eichstadt.

The Bavarian annalist, Aventinus, talking of Marianus and his companions and successors, says:

"By their devotion to the strictest religious exercises, and selfdenial, by their writing and teaching, they earned unbounded respect, and became well approved patterns of piety. They were favourites of everybody. And with one mouth the whole people spoke loudly in their praise; kings and nobles built monasteries for them, and invited them east and west."

Strange to say, the Irish monastery at Ratisbon came to have jurisdiction over not only the many other Irish monasteries of Germany, but also over many priories in Ireland, as is proved by two briefs on the subject by Innocent the Second. No less than twelve Irish monasteries in Germany were formally placed under the authority of the St. James' Monastery of Ratisbon by the Lateran Council of 1215.

The monastery of St. Mary of Vienna was founded by Henry, Duke of Austria in 1161. In the charter of this monastery he makes only Scots (Irish) eligible for admission "because of their long and acknowledged piety."

"Well trained in all human and divine knowledge was Marianus, when he came from Ireland," says the monk of St. James who was his biographer. "He was a poet as well as a theologian.' One of his prized works is his Commentaries on the Psalms; his most valued one is his Commentary on St. Paul's Epistles. This, written in the form of marginal and interlineary notes is still preserved in the Imperial Library of Vienna. In it his wide reading is shown by the fact that he quotes Jerome, Augustine, Gregory,

Origen, Alcuin, Cassian, and many such. Before he established his own monastery at Ratisbon, and while he still occupied a cell there, under the patronage of Abbess Emma, he employed himself constantly, without cease, writing and giving away books; these being chiefly copies of the Scriptures, and of various religious works. His biographer pictures him at this work all day long, while the two companions who had journeyed with him from Ireland, John and Candidus, prepared for him as fast as they could, parchment, and pens, and ink. And as fast as he turned off his books he gave them out gratis to the abbess, to her nuns, to monks, to poor widows, to everybody! This Irishman wanderer who, for sake of religion and learning, had exiled himself to far, strange lands, a man of brilliant parts, of vast reading, and deep learning, toiled, thus, day and night with his pen, to bestow the products of it upon the hundreds of these people who so hungered for what he had to give! What wonder that when this man decided finally to settle down in Ratisbon, "his determination was hailed with joy, by the whole population." And the abbess gave him the church of St. Peter, with an adjacent plot.

"This holy man wrote from beginning to end, with his own hand, the Old and New Testament, with explanatory comments on the same; and that not once or twice, but over and over again, with a view to the eternal reward-all the while clad in sorry garb, living on slender diet, attended and aided by his brethren both in the upper and lower monasteries, who prepared the parchments for his use; besides, he also wrote many smaller books and manuals, psalters for distressed widows and poor clerics of the same city, towards the health of his soul without any prospect of earthly gain. Furthermore, through the grace of God, many congregations of the monastic order, which in faith and charity and imitation of the blessed Marianus, are derived from the aforesaid Ireland, and inhabit Bavaria and Franconia, are sustained by the writings of the olessed Marianus."

He died on the ninth of February, 1088. Marianus' immediate successors in the abbacy built, and afterwards enlarged and beautified, the new monastery of St. James (first founded in 1090, two years after Marianus' death). It was done almost entirely with money obtained from Irish royalties, especially from Conor O'Brien, King of Munster, and again from King Murtach O'Brien. The old chronicle of Ratisbon says:

"Now be it known, that neither before nor since was there a more noble monastery, such magnificent towers. walls, pillars, and

roofs, so rapidly erected, so perfectly finished, as in this monastery, because of the wealth and money sent by the kings and princes of Ireland."

Yet the monks sought and got aid for their monastery from many quarters. One of these Irishmen penetrated even to Kiev, and from thence brought back a load of furs, contributed by the King of Russia.

And some of these Irish monks were signally honoured by royalty. Gregory and Carus, from St. Peter's, became chaplains for the Emperor Conrad, and the Empress Gertrude, who bestowed on them the church of St. Aegedius at Nuremberg. And Declan, who succeeded them there, was made chaplain to the Emperor Frederick.

The abbot of the Irish monastery of St. James was granted, by King Henry in 1225 the right of bearing in his coat of arms one-half of the eagle-which meant that he was elevated to the rank of one of the princes of the realm.

Dr. Wattenbach in his Congregation of the Monasteries of the Scots, describes for us how the bands of Irish missionaries travelled wide over Europe, seeking the fresh fields to which God urged them. "In this way we find them always wandering in large and small companies. Their outward appearance was most striking, the more so as they were still in the habit of painting their eyelids. Their whole outfit consisted of a pilgrim's staff, a leathern water-bottle, a wallet, and a case of some relics. In this guise they appeared before the people, addressing themselves to them everywhere with the whole power of their native eloquencesome (as Gallus) in the language of the country-the rest employing an interpreter before the people, but to ecclesiastics speaking in the common language of the Latin Church.

It was probably because of their Continental reputation for fearlessness and fight that the Abbot Sampson of St. Edmund's, in journeying to Pope Alexander in 1161-when Italy was excited by schism-being attacked and mobbed by a populace who were against Alexander, acted in the way he picturesquely describes: "I pretended to be a Scot, and having adopted the Scottish dress and behaviour, I shook my staff at those who scoffed at me, crying aloud at them, after the manner of the Scots." In this account it is also interesting to note that he says, "I carried my old shoes on my shoulders after the manner of the Scots"-a custom which still exists among the mountains of Ireland. The

Abbot's account of his strange experience is quoted by Wattenbach, from Cronica Johannes de Brakelonda.

Of all the hundreds of holy men who in those centuries exiled themselves from Ireland for the purpose of carrying Christ to the still darkened nations and peoples of Europe, we, joining with the Irish monk of Ratisbon who wrote the life of Marianus, may

well say:

"And now my brothers if you ask me what will be the reward of Marianus and the pilgrims like him who left the sweet soil of their native land, free from obnoxious beast and worm, with its mountains and hills, its valleys and groves, so well suited for the chase, the picturesque expanses of its rivers, its green fields and its streams swelling up from purest fountains, and like children of Abraham the Patriarch came without hesitation unto the land God pointed out to them, this is my answer: They will dwell in the house of the Lord with the Angels and Archangels forever: they will behold in Sion the God of Gods, to whom be honour and glory for endless ages."

Concannon, Helen: Columbanus.

Keller, Dr. Ferdinand: Essay on "Illuminations and Faesimiles from Ancient Irish MSS. in the Libraries of Switzerland." Translated from German with Introductory Remarks by the Rev. Wm. Reeves, D.D., in Ulster Journ. of Archæol. VIII.

Wattenbach: "Die Kongregation der Schottenkloster in Deutschland." Translated by Dr. Reeves, with notes, in the Ulster Journal of Arch æology, vol. VII.

Stokes, Miss Margaret: Three Months in the Forests of France: A Pilgrimage in Search of Vestiges of Irish Saints in France.

Six Months in the Apennines: A Pilgrimage in Search of Vestiges

of Irish Saints in Italy.

Lightfoot, Dr. J. B., Bishop of Durham: Leaders in the Northern Church.

CHAPTER XXIX

IRISH SCHOLARS ABROAD

LEARNING, like religion, had its hosts of Irish missionaries, who spread themselves afar, eager to lead to the light benighted peoples over the Continent, as well as in the neighbouring isles. When the Saxon, Aldhelm, who, it will be remembered, was a pupil of the Irishman Maeldubh, founder of the school of Malmesbury, wrote to his fellow-countryman, Eadfride ("who had given six years to philosophy in Ireland, and enriched his mind with the treasures of the Scotic hive")-"Ireland is a fertile and blooming nursery of letters: one might as soon reckon the stars of heaven, as enumerate her students and literature"-many of these Irish literary men were then eagerly pursuing their task of love among Aldhelm's fellow countrymen in all corners of Britain. But many others, too, were working in Continental fields, dispelling the darkness of distant lands with the bright torch which they bore from the beacon-fires of learning that glowed on every hill in Eirinn.

"These Irish torch-bearers founded," says John D'Alton in his R. I. A. Essay on Irish History, "the most flourishing schools of Christian Europe. And to them the world is indebted for the introduction of scholastic divinity and the application of philosophical reasoning to illustrate the doctrines of theology."

And Zimmer testifies: "They laid the corner-stone of western culture on the Continent, the rich result of which Germany shares and enjoys to-day, in common with all other civilised nations."

O'Halloran, illustrating their feeling of superiority over the Continentals, quotes from the life of the Irish Kilian, apostle of Franconia, how when his fellow countryman, St. Fiacre, encountered him in Gaul, he asked Kilian: "Quid te charissime frater, ad has barbaras, gentes deduxit?" ("What has brought you, dearest brother, to these barbarous people?") And Columbanus in one of his epistles tells the Continental scholars that the Irish schoolmen regarded some of their boasted Continental philosphers with indulgent tolerance.