The Abbey of St. Finbarr was a veritable outpost of Christianity. Dungarvan owes its name, and Waterford its Christianity, to Brother Garvan of this abbey; while Brother Brian became the patron of St. Brienne in France.
Cork University was a glorious institution in its time, and many who had no prejudices in favour of Ireland have endorsed its virtues from the times of Johnson to those of Newman, Hallam, and Macaulay.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire the schools and the abbeys of Ireland became famous. “Hither fled the timid for safety, and the leisured for learning.” Students came from all lands and teachers went out to all lands.
England’s Alfred came here to study, and Charlemagne drew his teachers from this “school of the West,” as it was afterward called by Johnson.
One ancient scrivener writes that at this period nearly all the learned were under the influence of Ireland. The great universities of Oxford, Paris, and Pavia, if not actually of Irish inception, were greatly indebted to the learning which spread forth from the Green Isle. There is scarcely a Continental centre of learning, from Palermo to Bruges, or from Grenada to Cologne, where some Irish saint, patron, or monkish scholar is not known and revered.
Cork should be endeared to Americans by reason of the association with the city of two whose names will never be forgotten—William Penn, the Quaker, and Father Mathew, the great temperance advocate.
In proof of the successful labours of the latter, a great writer of his time stated that not a single instance of drunkenness came under his observation during a sojourn of some weeks in Southern Ireland. It is a happy change from the rollicking recklessness of the ould Ireland of the fictionists and comic-song