Note 824 — Chapter X · LEARNING AND LANGUAGE.

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.