Note 8 — Chapter XVI

Father O'Hanlon, in his great work on the Irish saints, has pointed out a large number of close parallels between Fursa's vision and Dante's poem which seem altogether too striking to be fortuitous. (See vol. i. pp. 115-120.) There are a poem and a litany attributed to St. Fursa in the MS. H. 1. 11. in Trinity College, Dublin. The visions of Purgatory seen by Dryhthelm, a monk of Melrose, as recorded by Bede, which are later than St. Fursa's vision, are conceived very much in the same style, only are much more doctrinal in their purgatorial teaching. "Tracing the course of thought upwards," says Sir Francis Palgrave ("History of Normandy and England"), "we have no difficulty in deducing the poetic genealogy of Dante's 'Inferno' to the Milesian Fursæus."