dicants was not there. Hence we see them settling in monasteries and taking almost exactly the same tone as the other monks of Ireland.

Among the monasteries there has never been much of that humility which the founder of Christianity inculcated, and the Irish monks were the last in the world to show it. St. Patrick was humble as regards his learning, but he wasted little humility on the great ones of his time, if we can believe his own words and the reports we get of his conduct. Yet he was a long-suffering man compared with St. Columbkille, the genius who in the next century converted the pagan Irish and Picts in the north of Britain. At school he received favors because of his descent from Nial of the Nine Hostages, a famous monarch. When St. Kiaran, his schoolmate, rebelled against such partiality, no less distinguished a messenger than an angel appeared to him, showed him a plane, ax, and auger, and bluntly informed him that he, son of a carpenter, had given up only these tools for the service of God, while Columba had perhaps resigned the crown! Owing to his blood Columba treated kings of Ireland and Caledonia as his equals, received almost slavish consideration from the people, and did what he wished. That great foundation on I (later corrupted into Iona), where he trained missionaries for the Picts, Scots, and Saxons in squalid huts of wattled work and worshiped in a rough church of boards, was so famous that it became a rival of Rome in more than one particular. Like a good son of the Church, the Comte de Montalembert has little to say of this aspect of the Keltic Church, but his monumentalwork must be read with this in mind. The haughty

spirit of the clansmen devoted to their royal saint did not brook interference from the see of St. Peter, though in time they had to yield.

The life of St. Columbkille is in many respects the most curious and interesting of any for those who would study the monks of Ireland. He was close enough to St. Patrick to reflect the Oriental spirit of the age; he was more exactly a monk; he belonged to the purest Keltic nobility, and wrought among tribes which retained the largest amount of pre-Keltic blood of the aboriginal Finno-Ugrians of Europe. St. Finnian, who may have got his name through descent from that people, is a still earlier figure. He founded at Clonard, in Meath, a monastic school to which Irish and foreign youth flocked by thousands, exactly as under heathendom a famous Druid would collect pupils from far and near. The oak forests where Druids taught were naturally favorite spots for Christian teachers; hence arose these establishments celebrated for church and monastery - Kildare, the church of the oaks; Durrow, the plain of oaks; Adare, the ford of the oaks; Derry, the oakwood, now Londonderry, where St. Columba founded one of his innumerable churches. St. Finnian, magister sanctorum Hiberniæ, belonged by nature as well as by name to the sturdy, quiet-loving, phlegmatic aboriginals; he was the schoolmaster who attracted pupils to him. St. Columbkille, the most famous of these, showed the more typical Kelt in his love of movement and need of action. When he was not mortifying flesh in his dismal retreat among the fogs and gales of Caledonia he was traveling about to establish churches, browbeat Caledonian kings,

the

and astonish

the rude people of the two islands by the penances he inflicted on repentant sinners.

All this earlier epoch of Irish monastic life, from St. Patrick to the destruction of monasteries by the pagan exiles and annual marauders from the Baltic, is most curious in its differences from the later great epoch which lies between the Norman-Welsh invasion and the confiscation of church property, say between 1172 and 1537. The root of difference lies in the fact that the impulse of the earlier epoch was Oriental; that of the later, Italian of the popes.

We are far from knowing yet to what extreme points the Christian, animated by the spirit which drove Greek and Jewish ascetics into the deserts of the Thebaid on the Nile, was driven by his desire to find spiritual rest in the wilds. We know that the archaic bee-hive huts, of which the woodcut of the Fort of the Wolves gives an idea, were chosen as fit habitations by saintly men, just as in Palestine and on the Nile hermits scooped in the rock holes hardly large enough to lie in. We know that when the Norse exiles fled in wrath before the tyranny of their kings to Iceland, such men (Irishmen) had been before them. We can be sure that when the Icelanders settled Greenland, Irish monks accompanied or followed them. That Irishmen, acting under this powerful mental thrust, should have reached the American continent long before the Icelanders would be far from strange, and when we find in old Irish literature a distinct story of such an expedition, and in Welsh history at a later date another account in which a Welsh prince, Madoc, merely repeated the voyage of the Irish saint, there seems no reason why the earlier as well as the later legend should be called fictitious. Doubtless the particulars have been altered to suit the ideas

TOP OF BISHOP'S STAFF,
DUBLIN MUSEUM.

and ignorance of the men
who repeated those stories
through the centuries, but
no one will care to say
that they are impossible.
In another paper I may
bring some evidence to
bear on this point and show
that the Keltic monks of St.
Columbkille's epoch did leave
traces on this continent; though
from the nature of their case,
being men who disdained
wealth and sought by prefer-
ence the rudest habitations, lit-
tle was left by them to show
their former presence. As for
any influence which they might
have had on the native savages,
that could have been only most
superficial, vanishing with the
term of their lives or their stay.

St. Columbkille, Columba of

Brigit the good and the virgin,

Brigit our torch and our sun,

Brigit radiant and unseen,

May she lead us to the eternal kingdom!

The Culdees, or servants of God, who were regulars following the rule of an order of monks as well as seculars, or ordinary priests, kept alive some of the customs of the Druids whose enemies and detractors they were. We find them at Clonmicnois, Clondalkin, Devenish, Clones, Pubble, and Scattering, with colonies eastward in Caledonia, at York, and on the isle of Bardsey. St. Columbkille shows by his "Song of Trust" that in the sixth century the heathen magical philosophers were far from unknown, perhaps were still cherished by the people:

There is no sneeze that can tell our fate,
Nor bird upon the branch,

Nor trunk of gnarled oak.

Better is he in whom we trust,
The king who has made us all,

Who will not leave me to-night without refuge.
I adore not the voice of birds,

Nor chance, nor the love of a son or wife,
My Druid is Christ, the son of God!

In this passage note a few of the methods of divination practiced by the Druids which Columbkille rejected for the Christian faith though not able entirely to divest himself of similar but less obvious touches of paganism. Here is the divination from sneezing classic among the Greeks, from the roaring of the oakwood, the song and flight of birds, casting sticks or arrows on the ground and observing their "chance" position. The missal copied by the hand of this intensely living "servant of God" is to be seen in Dublin at the museum, having been placed there by its owner. The Cathach, or box, in which it was preserved formed for centuries the talisman of the O'Donnels when they went to war. The crosier, or bishop's staff, on the opposite page may be earlier work than it seems, but in all probability is not older than the twelfth century, and thus belongs to the second grand epoch of monasteries in Ireland. Its design recalls the patron saint of England, but it is by no means certain that St. George is intended; for the slaughter of a dragon is a subject common to the Middle Ages, and may often be understood as a general symbol of the subjugation of the sensual part of man by the spiritual, or, more historically, of the ruin of paganism by Christianity. Yet the pagan Kelts themselves did not lack the same idea. They in their turn overthrew a lower religion, as the sun overcomes the darkness, as spring gets the better of winter. A curious figure discovered in the Vosges district on the Continent shows VOL. XXXVIII.—17.

horse, beating the life out of one of the gods of the Finno-Ugrians, a monster with serpent feet, who is represented in archaic Irish legend by that Cichol Gri the "footless" out of whom legend afterwards fashioned the hero Cuchulinn. The greater number of ruins of monasteries in Ireland belong to the second period. The turbulent barons were fond of erecting abbeys and placing convents in beautiful buildings, with one eye to politics, the other to their salvation; and the chiefs of native tribes did the same to the best of their limited ability. Famous for early monasteries were Clonard, Glendalough, and Monasterboice, one of whose three crosses is figured herewith. St. Buithe, whose name has been softened into Boice, was the founder of this settlement, where the lamp of education, almost extinct on the mainland and in Britain, was kept alive. Giraldus de Barry preserved a quaint legend showing that the early monks had strange pets. St. Columba was furtively making a copy of a psalter belonging to Abbot Finnian, contrary to the latter's wish,- for copyrights were rigidly enforced at that time, when an eavesdropper applied his eye to a crack in the door to see what the saint was doing. Whereupon a domesticated crane, a bird which is still an ornament of Irish rivers, plucked out the eye of this early detective. The story goes to prove that a love of learning will tempt even a saint to a shabby trick, and also that the very birds of Erin turn on an informer.

Hardly any part of Ireland lacks reminders of the two great monastic periods before the Reformation, but the lovely fertile districts where the Barrow, the Suir, and the Blackwater bring the south-east quarter of the island into easy connection with Wales and France were particularly favored with thriving convents who lived in monasteries that still are exquisite in their ruins - Jerpoint, Cahir, Dunbrody, Selskar, and many others whose very existence must be sought for in the names of parishes and hamlets and the imperfect records of the religious of those periods. It is this favored quarter that the Cistercians have colonized once more in the present century. When they came, bringing back a reminder of the past glories of Catholic supremacy to a peasantry made conservative by the misrule of the upper classes and the inefficient government from Great Britain, an affecting movement was observed. For Trappists vowed to silence and the avoidance of the world it was necessary to fence the apparently sterile wastes on which the settlement was made. The wall round the great monastic domain had to be built. So the peasantry from the slopes of the Maeldown hills and beyond gathered in their villages if not their clans, and, headed by their priests, sought

the breezy uplands above Cappoquin and built that precinct wall within which no womanand indeed no man-is expected to set foot except under condition of presenting good reasons to the warders of the gate. If at Armagh the Protestant church occupies the citadel where Patrick founded a sanctuary; if at Cashel the Catholic archbishop bearing that title can only set foot on the Rock as any other guest may; if at Cork the memory of St. Finbar

is preserved by the big Protestant church, erected by London architects who hoped to reproduce a medieval cathedral — these peasants and their pastors could at least delude themselves with the idea that the foundation of Mount Melleray was the beginning of a return of the Church to her greatness before the Reformation. Who would care to cast a shadow of doubt on so natural and so pious a hope? Charles de Kay.

COME

From behind and before,

Edward Everett Hale.