the seventeenth century by Micheál ó Cléirigh. Stokes has indicated
the more important readings of the Brussels MS. in his edition. The
scribe of the Lismore Text was conscious of the defects of his copy:
for in a note appended to the Life of our saint, he says, "It is not I
who am responsible for the meaningless words in this _Life_, but the
bad manuscript"--_i.e._ the imperfect exemplar of which he was making
a transcript.

There were other Lives of the saint in existence, apparently no longer
extant. Of these, one was in the hands of the hagiographer Sollerius:
for in his edition of the _Martyrologium_ of Usuardus (Antwerp, 1714,
p. 523) he says, _Querani, Kirani, uel Kiriani uitam MS. habemus.
uariaque ad eam annotata, quae suo tempore digerentur_. This promise
he does not appear to have fulfilled; the Bollandist compiler, as we
have just noticed, had no materials but the imperfect Salamanca Life,
and was forced to fill its many gaps as best he could, by diligently
collecting references to Ciaran in the lives of other saints. Another
Life of the saint seems to be referred to in the _Martyrology of
Donegal_; under the 10th May that compilation quotes a certain "Life
of Ciaran of Cluain" (_i.e._ Clonmacnois) as the authority for a
statement to the effect that "the order of Comgall [of Bangor, Co.
Down] was one of the eight orders that were in Ireland." It would
be irrelevant to discuss here the meaning of this statement; its
importance for us lies in the fact that the sentence is not found in
any of the extant Lives, so that some other text, now unknown, must be
in question.

Ciaran of Clonmacnois was not the only saint of that name. Besides his
well-known namesake of Saighir (Seir-Kieran, King's Co.), there were
a few lesser stars called Ciaran, and there is danger of confusion