From the birth of Christ, a true reckoning, Three years add to these, Till the death of Patrick, chief Apostle.35 The second Patrick thus created, with a life which lasted one hundred and twenty years and terminated in 493, is now regarded as the Apostle of Ireland, and to him are appropriated the leading features of his career, while the Patrick of the older lives retains nothing but his designation of Sen Patrick. How much, however, the separate existence of this older Patrick embarrassed the martyrologists, we see from the glosses upon the Felire of Angus the Culdee, which are comparatively of much later date, and now first connect him with Glastonbury. The gloss on the word Srenat is 'that is, in Gloinestir of the Gael in Saxan, that is, in Britannia.' 36 The gloss on the last line is 'Tutor of Patraic of Macha; '37 and on the margin of the Ms. is written the following note:-'That is, old Patrick of Ros-dela in Magh Locha; but it is more true that he is in Glastonbury of the Gael, in the south of England, for the Scots were dwelling there on a pilgrimage. But his reliques are in Ulster. Sen Patraic in Armagh.' 38 Besides the metrical life attributed to Fiacc of Sleibhte, Colgan has collected and printed six prose lives, seven in all. Four of the prose lives-the second, third, fourth and seventh-are anonymous, the fifth life bears to be by a certain Probus, and the sixth by Jocelyn of Furness, whose date is known. It is the latest of the six, and must have 35 O genair Criost, airem ait, 36 .i. i n-Gloinestir na n-Gaedel i Saxsanaib.i. in Britannia.-Petrie, Ant. of Tara, p. 95. 37 Aite Patraic Macha, Sancti Patricii Episcopi doctor.-Petrie, p. 96. 38 Sen Patraic o Rus dela aMuig locha, sed verius est Comad i nGlastingiberra na nGaedel i n-desciurt Saxan ata; Scoti enim prius in peregrinatione ibi abitabant. Acht a tati a thaisi in- Ulad. Sen Patraic in-Ardmacha.—Ib. been written about the year 1185. These lives fall naturally into two groups. 39 The first, consisting of Colgan's second and fourth lives, must have been written after the Book of Armagh and the metrical life attributed to Fiacc, but before the compilation of the glosses added to the latter. They give Nemthor as the place of Patrick's birth, and place it in the plain of Taburna, thus identifying it with the Bannaven Taberniæ of his Confession. They make him to be carried into captivity from thence by an Irish fleet; but they 39 Colgan has unquestionably assigned too early a date to these lives, and the process by which he has done so is not very critical. He conjecturally connects the anonymous lives with the names of those who are said to have written biographies of the saint, and then takes the date of the death of the supposed author as indicating the period when the life must have been compiled. If the life contains expressions indicating a later date he supposes interpolations. There is, however, a very simple test by which these lives fall into the two groups above referred to, and that is by their use of the term Scotia, which was transferred from Ireland to Scotland in the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century. In Colgan's second and fourth lives Scotia is applied to Ireland, which places them before that period. The fifth life bears in itself to be written by Probus, and his expression 'Scotiam atque Britanniam, Angliam et Normanniam ceteraque gratis insulanorum baptizabis,' indicates a later date, while his only name for Ireland is Hibernia. He dedicates his life to a certain Paulinus, whom he addresses with much veneration; but this name is the Latin form of the Irish Maelpoil, and the Irish Annals record in the tenth century the deaths of four ecclesiastics of this name. These are, in 901 Maelpoil, abbot of Sruthair-Guaire; in 920 Maelpoil mac Aillela, bishop, anchorite and scribe, of Leath-Chuinn, an abbot of Indedhnen; in 992 Maelpoil, bishop of Mughain; and in 1000 Maelpoil, bishop of Cluain-mic-nois, and Coärb of Feichin.-An. F. M. The last is probably the Paulinus meant. Of Colgan's third life the first eleven chapters do not properly belong to it, but are part of his second life, and the life really commences with chapter twelve. It was certainly compiled after the life by Probus, from which much of it appears to have been taken. The life termed by Colgan the Tripartite has been given by him in a Latin translation only; but the original Irish text was discovered by the late Professor O'Curry in the British Museum, and another and somewhat older version in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It likewise belongs to this group, and a translation of the Irish text by Mr W. M. Hennessy has been annexed to Miss Cusack's Life of St. Patrick. The latest life of all is that by Jocelyn of Furness, which must have been compiled about the year 1185. introduce a number of incidents, connected with his childhood, which bear the usual miraculous character. They know nothing of the story told by the scholiast in Fiacc's hymn, of the transference of the family from Alclyde to Armorica; but the fourth life opens with the strange statement that some thought St. Patrick was sprung from the Jews; that, when they were dispersed after the fall of Jerusalem, a part of them took refuge in Armorica among the Britons, and from thence his parents migrated to the regions of Strathclyde; but this statement is peculiar to this life. Both of these lives make Patrick thirty years old when he went to Germanus, with whom he studied thirty years, and state that he preached to the Irish for sixty years, thus adopting the chronology of the second Patrick. The second group consists of the life by Probus, Colgan's third life, the Tripartite life, and that by Jocelyn. These were all compiled later than the tenth century, and that by Probus appears to be the oldest. He was acquainted with the Book of Armagh, part of the lives contained in which are inserted verbatim; but he was also acquainted with the glosses to the hymn of Fiacc, for he inserts the story of the migration of Patrick's family to Amorica. He places his birth in the Roman province (in Britanniis), in the village of Bannauc of the Taburnian region, which region he considers to be also the Nentrian province, where giants are said to have formerly inhabited. But the main addition to the incidents of Patrick's life, which characterises this group, is his connection with St. Martin of Tours. The scholiast on the hymn attributed to Fiacc had already made his mother Conches St. Martin's sister, and St. Patrick is now made to reside for four years with him at Tours, where he was instructed in the rules of monastic life, and received the tonsure; but, as St. Martin died in 397, the date is too early for St. Patrick. On the other hand, it is probably true of St. Ninian, who is also said to have been a nephew of St. Martin and associated with him, and with the dates of whose life it is more consistent. Probus, however, seems to have preserved one incident which is true of the historic Patrick, when he states that, after he was ordained priest by a bishop, whom he calls St. Senior, he preached to the Irish before the mission of Palladius, and before his own consecration as a bishop. This short analysis of the lives of St. Patrick will be sufficient to show how the real events in the life of the historic Patrick, so far as they can be ascertained, were gradually overlaid by spurious additions, till at length the legendary life of a spurious Patrick, as we now have it, was developed out of it. Bridget. Besides the great legendary apostle of the Irish, the Lives of St. virgin St. Bridget seems also to occupy a prominent place in Irish hagiology. That she was a historic character, belonging to the earliest period of the Irish Church, there seems little reason to doubt, and it is exceedingly probable that St. Patrick himself in his Confession alludes to her when he says, 'There was one blessed Scotic maiden, very fair, of noble birth and of adult age, whom I baptized; and after a few days she came to me, because, as she declared, she had received a response from a messenger of God desiring her to become a virgin of Christ and to draw near to God. Thanks be to God, on the sixth day from that, she with praiseworthy eagerness seized on that state of life which all the virgins of God likewise now adopt;' but her life too was now overlaid with spurious tales and fabulous incidents, till it assumed an aspect far removed from its probable reality. Space will not permit us to analyse these lives, or to enter further into the history of the origin and development of the great hagiologic literature of Ireland; suffice it to mention that the two oldest lives of Bridget are attributed to Bishop Ultan, under whose auspices Tirechan compiled his Annotations, and to Cogitosus, who can now be identified with the father of Muirchu, who wrote the second life in the Book of Armagh. Hagiology Bearing of the Church on the edu Besides the Lives of St. Columba by Cummene and Adamnan in the seventh century, the oldest lives in the Scotch hagiology of which we can fix the dates, are the Life of St. Ninian by Aelred, who died in the year 1166, the Life of St. Kentigern, of which a fragment only remains, which was written during the episcopate of Herbert, who was bishop from 1147 to 1164, and that by Jocelyn of Furness, written at the request of his namesake, who was bishop of Glasgow from 1174 to 1199. These lives therefore belong to the twelfth century, when the manipulation of the old chronicles of Scotland had already commenced, which laid the foundation of that fictitious scheme of history, both civil and ecclesiastic, which was reduced to a system by John of Fordun; and to some extent they bear the marks of that influence. The Life of Servanus, however, which has been preserved in the Marsh Mss. in Dublin, belongs probably to a somewhat earlier period. With the exception of these lives, we are dependent almost entirely upon the lections in the 'Propria Sanctorum' of the Aberdeen Breviary, and on the works of Dempster and Camerarius, for notices of the Scottish saints; but the former were compiled after Fordun's great work, and are tainted by the false chronology of his Chronicle; and the two latter works, after the publication of Hector Boece's work, and are under the influence of the fictitious history elaborated by him. The dates attached to the saints in the Scotch Calendar are in the main fictitious, and cannot be depended on, Such is a short view of the hagiologic literature of Ireland and Scotland, which forms so remarkable a feature cation of in the literature of the church. Its bearing upon the educathe people. ginn, or lector. The Ferlei- tion of the people presents an equally important feature. In the later part of the eighth and in the ninth centuries we find a new functionary appearing in the monasteries, and gradually superseding the Scribhnigh, or scribe. This |