envelope every figure whose name crops up on his pages. Even four
hundred years later the name of a really great prince and warrior like
Brian Boru, or Boruma, awakens no particular sense of reality, nay as
often as not is met by a smile of incredulity. The existence of St.
Columba no one, however, has been found rash enough to dispute! His, in
fact, is one of those essentially self-lit figures which seem to shed
some of their own light upon every other they come in contact with, even
accidentally. Across the waste of centuries we see him almost as he
appeared to his contemporaries. There is something friendly--as it were,
next-door-neighbourly--about the man. If we land to-day on Iona, or
stand in any of the little chapels in Donegal which bear his name, his
presence seems as real and tangible to us as that of Tasso at Ferrara or
Petrarch at Avignon. In spite of that thick--one is inclined to say
rank--growth of miracles which at times confuse Adamnan's fine portrait
of his hero--cover it thick as lichens some monumental slab of
marble--we can still recognize his real lineaments underneath. His great
natural gifts; his abounding energy; his characteristically Irish love
for his native soil; for the beloved "oaks of Derry." We see him in his
goings out and his comings in; we know his faults; his fiery Celtic
temper, swift to wrath, swift to forgive when the moment of anger is
over. Above all, we feel the charm of his abounding humanity. Like
Sterne's Uncle Toby there seems to have been something about St. Columba
which "eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter
under him," and no one apparently ever refused to respond to
that appeal.

One thing it is important hereto have clearly before the mind, as it is
very apt to be overlooked. At the time of St. Columba's ministry,
England, which during the lifetime of St. Patrick had been Roman and
Christian, had now under the iron flail of its Saxon conquerors lapsed