Irish Nationality

								

the Loire and Garonne. The Irish themselves served as sailors and
pilots in the ocean traffic, and travelled as merchants, tourists,
scholars and pilgrims. Trading-ships carried the wine of Italy and
later of Provence, in great tuns in which three men could stand
upright, to the eastern and the western coasts, to the Shannon and the
harbours of Down; and probably brought tin to mix with Irish copper.
Ireland sent out great dogs trained for war, wool, hides, all kinds of
skins and furs, and perhaps gold and copper. But this material trade
was mainly important to the Irish for the other wealth that Gaul had
to give--art, learning, and religion.
Of art the Irish craftsmen took all that Gaul possessed--the great
decorated trumpets of bronze used in the Loire country, the fine
enamelling in colours, the late-Celtic designs for ornaments of bronze
and gold. Goldsmiths travelled oversea to bring back bracelets, rings,
draughtboards--"one half of its figures are yellow gold, the others
are white bronze; its woof is of pearl; it is the wonder of smiths how
it was wrought." They borrowed afterwards interlaced ornament for
metal work and illuminated manuscripts. In such arts they outdid their
teachers; their gold and enamel work has never been surpassed, and in
writing and illumination they went beyond the imperial artists of
Constantinople. Their schools throughout the country handed on a great
traditional art, not transitory or local, but permanent and national.
Learning was as freely imported. The Latin alphabet came over at a
very early time, and knowledge of Greek as a living tongue from
Marseilles and the schools of Narbonne. By the same road from
Marseilles Christianity must have come a hundred years or so before
the mission of St. Patrick--a Christianity carrying the traditions
and rites and apocalypses of the East. It was from Gaul that St.
Patrick afterwards sailed for his mission to Ireland. He came to a
land where there were already men of erudition and "rhetoricians" who
scoffed at his lack of education. The tribes of Ireland, free from
barbarian invasions as they had been free from Roman armies, developed
a culture which was not surpassed in the West or even in Italy. And
this culture, like the art, was national, spread over the whole land.
But while the Irish drew to themselves from the Empire art, learning,
religion, they never adopted anything of Roman methods of government in
church or state. The Roman centralized authority was opposed to their
whole habit of thought and genius. They made, therefore, no change in
their tribal administration. As early as the second century Irishmen
had learned from Gaulish landowners to divide land into estates marked
out with pillar-stones which could be bought and sold, and by 700 A.D.
the country was scored with fences, and farms were freely bequeathed by
will. But these estates seem still to have been administered according
to the common law of the tribe, and not to have followed the methods of