devotion or caprice made various additions, subtractions and occasional
multiplications. The Irish Lives are almost certainly of a somewhat
earlier date than the Latin and are based partly (i.e. as regards the
bulk of the miracles) on local tradition, and partly (i.e. as regards
the purely historical element) on the authority of written materials.
They too were, no doubt, copied and interpolated much as were the Latin
Lives. The present copies of Irish Lives date as a rule from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only, and the fact that the Latin
and the Irish Life (where there is this double biography) sometimes
agree very perfectly may indicate that the Latin translation or Life is
very late.

The chief published collections of Irish Saints' Lives may be set down
as seven, scil.:--five in Latin and one each in Irish and English. The
Latin collections are the Bollandists', Colgan's, Messingham's,
Fleming's, and Plummer's; the Irish collection is Stokes' ("Lives of
Saints from the Book of Lismore") and the English is of course
O'Hanlon's.

Most striking, probably, of the characteristics of the "Lives" is their
very evident effort to exalt and glorify the saint at any cost. With
this end of glorification in view the hagiographer is prepared to
swallow everything and record anything. He has, in fact, no critical
sense and possibly he would regard possession of such a sense as rather
an evil thing and use of it as irreverent. He does not, as a
consequence, succeed in presenting us with a very life-like or
convincing portrait of either the man or the saint. Indeed the saint,
as drawn in the Lives, is, as already hinted, a very unsaintlike
individual--almost as ready to curse as to pray and certainly very much
more likely to smite the aggressor than to present to him the other