I claim for the Irish race that throughout their history they have cut down their bodily necessities to the quick, in order to devote time and energy to the pursuit of knowledge; that they have engaged in intellectual pursuits, not infrequently of a high order, on a low basis of material comfort; that they have persevered in the quest of learning under unparalleled hardships and difficulties, even in the dark night of “a nation’s eclipse”, when a school was an unlawful assembly and school-teaching a crime.  I claim, moreover, that, when circumstances were favorable, no people have shown a more adventurous spirit or a more chivalrous devotion in the advancement and spread of learning.

Love of learning implies more than a natural aptitude for acquiring information.  It connotes a zest for knowledge that is recondite and attainable only at the expense of ease, of leisure, of the comforts and luxuries of life, and a zeal for the cultivation of the mental faculties.  It is of the soul and not of the body; it refines, elevates, adorns.  It is allied to sensibility, to keenness of vision, to the close observation of mental phenomena.  Its possessor becomes a citizen of the known world.  His mind broadens; he compares, contrasts, conciliates; he brings together the new and the old, the near and the distant, the permanent and the transitory, and weaves from them all the web of systematized human thought.

I am not here concerned with the extent of Ireland’s contribution to the sum of human learning, nor with the career of her greatest scholars; I am merely describing the love of learning which is characteristic of the race, and which it seems best to present in a brief study of distinct types drawn from various periods of Irish history.

In the pre-Christian period the Druid was the chief representative of the learning of the race.  He was the adviser of kings and princes, and the instructor of their children.  His knowledge was of the recondite order and beyond the reach of ordinary persons.  The esteem in which he was held by all classes of the people proves their love for the learning for which he stood.

Patrick came:  and with him came a wider horizon of learning and greater facilities for the acquisition and diffusion of knowledge.  Monastic schools sprang up in all directions—­at Clonard, Armagh, Clonmacnois, Bangor, Lismore, Kildare, Innisfallen.  These schools were celebrated throughout Europe in the earlier middle ages, and from the fifth to the ninth century Ireland led the nations of Europe in learning and deserved the title of the “Island of Saints and Scholars.”  Our type is the student in one of these monastic schools.  He goes out from his parents and settles down to study in the environs of the monastery.  He is not rich; he resides in a hut; his time is divided between study, prayer, and manual labor.  He becomes a monk, only to increase in devotion to learning and to accentuate his privations.  He copies and illuminates manuscripts.