Having arrived at the very threshold of the Renaissance, we must now return to the beginning of the Dark Ages and consider the development of the West during those same seven hundred years whose course we have just surveyed in the East. For conditions in the two halves of Europe were vastly different. In Byzantium we saw the shrinking nucleus of a superior civilisation, fearful of loss, constantly on the defensive, stereotyped in its institutions and culture. In the West we shall see by contrast evidences not of atrophy but of growth. The Western peoples were more anxious to acquire new blessings than to preserve the few they could already command. Their world had touched rock bottom, had been plunged into chaos and was now in mid-passage out. Unafraid of change, they were not desirous of barring its effects from any sector of their lives. The period of the Roman past glittered in their traditions as a golden age which having existed once could no doubt be restored; and that conviction in the midst of their ever-present discontents made them eager to throw as much as possible into the melting-pot.

Our proper starting-point is in time the sixth century and in space a remote island to which Roman power had never extended its latinising sway. The Ireland of St Patrick was the first place to which the literary heritage of the classics came, as it was to come eventually to the whole of Western Europe, from the outside, a gift of the gods to be won through judicious learning, a gift possibly of forbidden fruit.