Note 26 — Chapter XIII
Reading edition
As this was probably the first poem in Latin ever composed in Ireland, it deserves some consideration. It is a sort of trochaic tetrameter catalectic, of the very rudest type. The ictus, or stress of the voice, which is supposed to fall on the first syllable of the first, third, fifth, and seventh feet, seldom corresponds with the accent. The elision of "m" before a vowel is disregarded, no quantities are observed, and the solitary rule of prosody kept is that the second syllable of the seventh foot is always short, with the exception of one word, indutus, which the poet probably pronounced as indŭtus. The third verse runs thus, with an evident effort at vowel rhyme ("Liber Hymnorum," vol. i. p. 11).
"Beati Christi custodit mandata in omnibus Cujus opera refulgent clara inter homines."
Muratori printed this hymn, from the so-called Antiphonary of Bangor, a MS. of the eight century preserved in the Ambrosian Library. The rude metre is that employed by Hilary in his hymn beginning—
"Ymnum dicat turba fratrum, ymnum cantus personet,"
which, as Stokes points out, is the same as that of the Roman soldiers, preserved in Suetonius,
"Cæsar Gallias subégit, Nicomedes Cæsarem."
The internal evidence of the antiquity of this hymn is "strong," says Stokes, "first, the use of the present tense in describing the saint's actions; secondly, the absence of all reference to the miracles with which the Tripartite and other lives are crowded; and, thirdly, the absence of all allusion to the Roman mission on which many later writers from Tirechan downwards insist with much persistency." We may then, I think, receive this hymn as authentic.