He memorizes the Psalms.  He glosses the Vulgate Scriptures with vernacular notes.  He receives ordination, and, realizing that there are benighted countries ten times as large as his native land beyond the seas, and, burning with zeal for the spread of the Gospel and the advancement of learning, sails for Britain, or passes into Gaul, or reaches the slopes of the Apennines, or the outskirts of the Black Forest.  The rest of his life is devoted to the foundation of monasteries to which schools are attached, to the building of churches, and to the diffusion around him of every known branch of knowledge.  He may have taken books from Ireland over seas, and, of these, relics are now to be found among the treasures of the ancient libraries of Europe.  Columcille, Columbanus, Adamnan, Gall, Virgilius occur to the mind in dwelling on this type.

The hereditary seanchaidhe, who treasured up the traditional lore of the clan and its chief, was held in high honor and enjoyed extraordinary privileges.  He held a freehold.  He was high in the graces of the chief, and officiated at his inauguration.

An important type is the Irish ecclesiastical student abroad in the penal days.  School teaching, unless at the sacrifice of Faith, was a crime in Ireland, and the training required for the priesthood had to be obtained on the continent.  The Irish out of their poverty established colleges in Rome (1628), Salamanca (1593), Seville (1612), Alcala (1590), Lisbon (1593), Louvain (1634), Antwerp (1629), Douai (1577), Lille (1610), Bordeaux (1603), Toulouse (1659), Paris (1605), and elsewhere.  As late as 1795 these colleges contained 478 students, and some of them are still in existence.  The young student in going abroad risked everything.  He often returned watched by spies, with his life in danger.  Yet the supply never failed; the colleges flourished; and those who returned diffused around them not only learning but the urbanity and refinement which were a striking fruit and mark of their studies abroad.

Another type is the Irish scribe.  In the days of Ireland’s fame and prosperity and of the flood-tide of her native language, he was a skilled craftsman, and the extant specimens of his work are unsurpassed of their kind.  But I prefer to look at him at a later period, when he became our sole substitute for the printer and when his diligence preserved for us all that remains of a fading literature.  He was miserably poor.  He toiled through the day at the spade or the plough, or guided the shuttle through the loom.  At night, by the flare of the turf-fire or the fitful light of a splinter of bogwood, he made his copy of poem or tract or tale, which but for him would have perished.  The copies are often ill-spelt and ill-written, but with all their faults they are as noble a monument to national love of learning as any nation can boast of.