Excerpt from The Life and Writings of Saint Columban: 542? 615 The distinctive characteristics Of the Irish monks Of Old, th J passion for pilgrimage and preaching, the imperious necessity, as Montalembert calls it, of spreading themselves without, of I seeking or carrying knowledge and faith afar, never died out like the grand Old faith itself, it is the characteristic of the. Irish race. In our own day hundreds of thousands of the sons and daughters of Erin leave their country to earn their bread' in honest toil abroad; and in every land under heaven, in Asia, Africa and America, in Australia and New Zealand and in the South Sea Islands, we find the Irish priest and monk and bishop converting the heathen or keeping bright the lamp of faith where it has already been lighted. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... At The Lombard Court. about fifty years before Columban's arrival in Italy the last wave of the Volkerwanderung--the Migration of the Nations--had swept over the Peninsula. The story of the Lombard conquest is a story of blood and iron. The pages of Paul Warnefrid,1 the historian of the Lombards, read at times like fragments of an epic poem, so full are they of deeds of prowess and wanton bloodshed, of crime and vengeance. When we hear of the Lombards (Langobards) for the first time in the reign of Augustus, they had their seats on the lower Elbe, south of the Angles and Saxons and southwest of the Vandals, and formed part of the confederacy of German tribes known as the kingdom of Marbod. Moving southward in the fourth century, they were subjected by the Huns and regained their independence only after the death of Attila. At the beginning of the sixth century they settled on the Danube, in what is now Lower Austria; and a little later we find them, under King Audoin, south of the Middle Danube on lands given to them by Justinian. During the long and bloody wars for the possession of Rome between the Goths and the Byzantines thousands of Lombards fought in the armies of Belisarius and Narses against Totila and Teias, and their glowing accounts of the beauty and fertility of Italy ripened in Alboin, Audoin's successor, the long-cherished plan of possessing himself of the Pearl of the Empire. The immediate occasion of the Lombard invasion is said to have been an invitation extended to Alboin by Narses, who, enraged at the appointment of a new Exarch, had resolved to make the hardy warriors of Pannonia the instruments of his vengeance. However that may be, in the year 568, after defeating his eastern neighbors, the Gepidae, so decisively...

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This Is A New Release Of The Original 1914 Edition.