ples, and arrived there, according to Bede, A. D. 565." The conversion to Christianity of Bradius, the most powerful king of the Picts, soon followed, from Colme's zeal and preaching, so that he is the apostle of that ancient people. As some requital for his good service, they gave him the little island of Fly, or lona, where he built a monastery, which for ages was the seminary of North Britain, and for a still longer time the burying-place of successive saints, and of kings of many countries. The simple style of Mr. A. Butler is worthy of another quota tion. "He was of such authority, that neither king nor people did any thing without his consent. When King Ædhan, or Aidanus, succeeded to his cousin Connell on the throne of British Scotland, he received the royal insignia from St. Columba. Four years before he died, St. Columba was favoured with a vision of angels, which left him in many tears, because he learned from those heavenly messengers that God, moved by the prayers of the British and the Scottish churches, would prolong his exile upon earth yet for four years. Having continued his labours in Scotland thirty-four years, he clearly and openly foretold his own death; and on a Saturday, the 9th of June, said to his disciple Dermot This day is called the Sabbath, that is, the day of rest, and such will it truly be to me, for it will put an end to my labours.' His body was buried in Iona, but some ages after removed to Down, and laid in one vault with those of St. Patrick and St. Bridget." The latter fact has been disputed; but Cambrensis thus affirms it: "In Down three Saints one grave do fill, Bridget, Patrick, and Colmekil.” Before parting from Mr. A. Butler, it is to be remarked that while he makes Colme very exemplary in his devotions and penances, he adds that the saint never appeared morose in consequence of them: in fact, that he showed "an incomparable mildness and charity towards all men." The same beautiful character beams forth in the following lines, written by him as an adieu to his cil in Derry: I have found them annexed to an account of the siege of that little city, property of certain Cutlers of London, compiled by an Orange clergyman of the Established Church; and the reverend author attaches some importance to them, adding, that the translation (in which they appear) was made from Colme's Latin, or Irish, by a dignitary of his own cloth "My fragrant banks and fruitful trees, farewell, My sloe, my nut, my apple, and my well." But old Geoffrey Keating, before mentioned, altogether denies that Colme was a sweet-tempered saint. He asserts, in the first instance, that a very holy person, called Molaise, sent Colmekil into Scotland, and enjoined him never again to behold Ireland with his eyes, as a religious penance to correct the vindictive nature of the saint, who had embroiled the kingdom in great confusion, and, to gratify his revenge, was the promoter of many bloody engagements." * Lewis's Ancient History of Great Britain says, that amongst its ruins remained a churchyard in which were the tombs of forty-eight kings of Scotland, eight kings of Norway, and four kings of Ireland. What brought the Irishmen so far from home? This is terrible to say nothing of its assigning a very different reason for Colme's expatriation from that given by the author of the Lives of the Saints. But, in truth, I do not mean to set up our very Irish chronicler against Mr. Charles Butler's relative; and extracts are continued to be made from him only in the hope of gratifying the reader. Keating will have it, according to his "ancient manuscripts," that, after Colme's settlement in Iona, he revisited Ireland, to attend a national council upon some important occasion;* and now comes in a sufficiently strange proof of his vindictive and revengeful qualities. "When he came near Drumceat, where the principal of the kingdom were assembled, the wife of Hugh, King of Ireland, was incensed at his arrival, and commanded her son Connell to use those religious foreigners (many 'prelates, presbyters, and deacons,') with contempt and disrespect, and not to regard their office, nor give them the least countenance or protection. This uncivil design was soon communicated to St. Collumkil, who, being of a quick resentment, refused to enter the assembly until he had obtained his revenge upon the Queen and the Prince for this treatment; and therefore he addressed himself to Heaven, and importunately petitioned for an exemplary stroke of vengeance; which was, that the Queen, and her waiting-lady, who attended near her person, might be punished with a disease, which, though not incurable, yet should afflict them with long and lingering pains! This infliction was sent by Heaven, and obliged the Queen and her attendant to confine themselves to their apartments, and not to come abroad." What follows is curious: "During the time of their confinement, the superstitious people of the country imagined that they were turned into cranes; for it happened that two cranes, that were never observed before, frequented an adjoining ford." Keating agrees, however, with Mr. A. Butler, as to Colme's austerity: "This Irish saint mortified his body by a continued course of abstinence and austerity, which, by this severe usage, became so macerated, that his bones had almost pierced out through his skin; and when the wind blew hard through the wall of his cell, which was unplaistered, and forced aside his upper garment, his ribs became visible through his habit: for, by his fasting and other acts of devotion, he was no more than the image of a man, and was worn to a very ghastly spectacle." Although thus he had not always been: : "He was naturally of a hale and robust constitution; for, when he used to sing psalms, his voice might be distinctly heard a mile and a half from the place where he was performing his devotions and as we find expressly stated in his vision, no evil spirit could bear the divine and harmonious sound of his voice, but fled away far out of the reach of it." Upon the authority of this vision, "The amrah," which is doubted, however, even by Geoffrey Keating, "his guardian angel, who always attended him, was known by the name of Axall; and his evil genius. Evading Molaise's penance by keeping his eyes covered with a piece of cloth all the time he was in Ireland, and even during his voyages to and from the country. who followed him as a plague to infect his mind and inspire him with impious thoughts and wicked designs, was called Demel.' To part from Colmekil, leaving him in the hands of such a biographer, might seem to imply a sneer at his pretensions to a respectable name, and praiseworthy actions. I shall therefore establish him in the opinion of the reader, by an eulogy gleaned from a very different source; namely, the speech of a Presbyterian clergyman, Dr. Irving, of Little Dunkeld, delivered, in the year 1818, before the Commission of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, met to consider the necessity of erecting new parishes in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland: "The Highlands and Isles were the seat of religious knowledge when the rest of Britain, I may say of Europe, was involved in ignorance and barbarity. This arose from the exertions of the disciples of Columba, the missionaries of Iona, whose light was never totally extinguished in the Highlands and Isles; and I must do the Popish hierarchy the justice to say, that her priests, or parish ministers, though they taught errors not yet altogether eradicated from amongst Protestants, propagated most diligently the fundamental truths of the Gospel, as I had often an opportunity of observing." Upon a future occasion, I shall recur to this speech of Dr. Irving, of Little Dunkeld. The next Irish priest likely to prove most interesting to us, and living a little later than Colmekil, appears to be the princely-born, the immaculate, but the hard-hearted woman-hater, St. Kevin, or Colmegen, (fair-begotten). His precocious talent for sanctity was as surprising as that of poor Chatterton for poetry. At twelve years of age, he was placed under the care of three eminent anchorites, Dagain, Lochan, and Enna: and at fifteen, having diligently studied with them the Holy Scriptures, he took the monastic habit. "Some time after," when, it is presumed, he could not be more than twenty, he founded the monastery of Glendalough (valley of the lakes), in perhaps the most peculiarly romantic spot in the county of Wicklow. His reputation, and that of his new establishment, attracted crowds of pious people, and the solitude of Glendalough became covered with a celebrated and holy city. Having been created a bishop, Kevin erected a cathedral church, in the same place, to St. Peter and Paul. The ruins of seven or eight buildings yet stand in the lonely valley, bleached and weather-stained and moss-spotted, some of them half embedded in their own rubbish, or in the greensward that hides it. Separate from every other relique, and much more ancient than every other, towers one of those round pillars, found only in Ireland and the East, upon the era of the building of which, or upon their use or purpose, no two antiquaries can agree. Doubtless, it was Kevin's attraction to found in Glendalough his first monastery; for, whenever the primitive priesthood of Ireland met with one of those mysterious indicators of a forgotten people, there they constructed their simple cells. Hewn in the solid and perpendicular rock of a mountain, which blackens with its shadow the waters of the valley, is a cave well-known as "St. Kevin's bed," and as the scene of his abominable cruelty to the love-sick Cathleen. It hangs at a fearful height over the lough, and in order to enter it, you must first ascend above it, and then creep down an in-sloping ledge, where a single false step were destruction. And yet, to the edification of the natives, the then Great Unknown safely achieved the task two or three years ago; and so did the poor Cathleen thirteen hundred years ago, but not with his impunity. The young, the comely, the famed St. Kevin, had been haunted by her fluttering sighs, and her sad, sad glances, out of all his cloisters in the valley, and he scaled this mountain and hewed this cave to hide himself from her. But the persevering maiden, rendered sagacious by a passion that indeed often makes us wise (after it has made us fools), tracked him, in her searchings and wanderings, after his disappearance, by the fresh-pulled green rushes which he had provided for his flinty couch; and which, during his progress up the mountain, had fallen from his bundle. Careless of the perils of her way, she suddenly presented her blue, tearful eyes, her streaming golden hair, and her glowing cheeks, at the threshold of the boy-hermit's cell: and he, as suddenly, started from his chilling meditations, and pushed her into the deep, black waters beneath. The young tiger! Had Potiphar's wife been-not Potiphar's wife, but a tender, lovelorn, love-inspiring virgin, it is odds that Joseph himself would have left him the shadow of a precedent for such conduct: at all events, the generous-hearted brother of the little Benjamin could never have murdered the poor girl. Even St. Senanus, in the opinion of Mr. Thomas Moore, must have hesitated; for the melodious bard of Erin, though he faithfully records the rude refusal of the saint of the Shannon to allow the lady to land out of her skiff, on a very dark night, upon the shores of his prudish Island, yet surmises, that if she had taken no notice of his surliness, but waited till morning, "And given the Saint one rosy smile, She never had left his lovely isle." By the way, the beautiful version of this tragical story of Cathleen and Kevin in the Irish Melodies, endeavours, in poetical mercy to Kevin's character, to soften the atrocity of his act. Mr. Moore insinuates that previous to the real appearance of his unhappy admirer, the barbarous young saint had been asleep and dreaming of her proffered endearments, and that when he actually pushed her into the lake, he had only started up, in the impulse of his dream, to inflict that unmeasured punishment upon her shadow. But this account would sink, rather than raise St. Kevin, in the opinion of all Christian people. In the situation of a dream, above all other situations, his iron nature ought to have been off its guard; but instead of that it prompts him to be as ferocious as in his most severe waking moments even he could be. So that Mr. Moore would, for his sake, have done better by adhering to the plain prose of the fact, as authentic tradition relates it. There is a pretty circumstance connected with this tale, about the sky-lark never being heard or seen in the neighbourhood of Glendalough, which I fear I forget, or at least do not distinctly remember. Perhaps the peasants, giving different accounts of the means by which Cathleen discovered her murderer's retreat, told me something like what follows. After much disconsolate wandering through the valley, she sat herself down to rest upon the shores of the gloomy water, and fixing her eye on one of those aerial songsters, as he shot upward from a tuft close at hand, unconsciously followed his ascent into the Dec.-VOL. XXIII. NO. XCVI. 2 M heavens, until, as he passed Kevin's bed, the morose Saint peeped out to deprecate his interruption in his devotions, and thus became revealed to her glance and after the catastrophe, the Saint, blaming the skylark for the whole misfortune, cursed him in all his generations, and commanded him and them never again to appear in Glendalough; an injunction which ever after, and to this day, he and they reverently observe We have already found Dr. Ledwich vainly endeavouring to deny the existence of St. Patrick. We now meet him making a similar attempt on the life of the next old Irish priest we would glance atSt. Canice, namely, or Kenny. In his "Antiquities of Irishtown and Kilkenny," the Doctor says" The first settlement of the Gael seems to have been on low ground, along the margin of Nore" (my native Nore! my own gentle, curving, crystal river! on thy tufted banks were woven my first wild-garlands of song, and wooed and won the smiles that then and now make sunshine for my heart! Blooming and joyous be those banks for ever! Clear and untroubled thy waters, laughing in the sun!-Still may the earliest water-lilies spring up upon thy edge, and the earliest sigh of spring dimple thy shining face! At the mere sound of thy soft name, behold how I leave the dry Dr. Ledwich to gambol one moment by thy side-but I must return, to him and to repay thee for the separation, perchance, my native Nore, thou may'st some day command exclusive honours from my pen.. Reader, forgive me, and look back to the last word of the quotation.) "The high land was covered with a wood, and from this circumstance had a Celtic name, and was called Coil or Kyle-ken-ui, the wooded head or hill, near the river, and by the natives, Cillcannigh, or Kilkenny!" Stating, however, that by other accounts Kilkenny is named after St. Canice, or Kenny, and his cil or kil, built near the old round tower which he found on the spot, Dr. Ledwich proceeds to scout "the vulgar and groundless notion." "We have," he continues, "numberless instances of the monks, in dark ages, personifying rivers and places like the heathen mythologists. Thus they have made of the river Shannon or Senus, St. Senanus, and of the town of Down or Donun, St. Dunus." How does he know? and is it not just as good an assertion-for the Doctor. only asserts-that of St. Senanus, and St. Dunus, they made Senus or Shannon, and Donun or Down?-are not places called after persons, as often, at least, as persons are invented out of places? But no matter. All this means, though the meaning is only insinuated, that no such. person as Kenny built a cil or kil on the site of the present cathedral of St. Canice; for if it be admitted that a man of that name did so, Kil and Kenny joined together, would certainly come nearer than does the Doctor's round-about derivation to the compound-Kilkenny. Would he say that the syllable Kil, which begins so many old names of places in old Ireland, is not generally allowed to mean church? P. 71 of his own work, he admits that in several instances it does: and why not in this one? Merely because he wants to make problematic the exist * For example: a nervous English writer of Erin met a fierce-looking Irish giant, with a great shillelagh in his hand, on the road side, and the following dialogue occurred between them. "Pray, where have you been?"-"I went to Kilone!"-" And where are you going?"" I'm going to Kilmany!"-" And then?"-"I'll be going to Kilmore!" Ay? and then?" Why, then, I'll go to Kilenall!"-The catechist ran away. |