BRENDAN'S FABULOUS VOYAGE.

[_A Lecture delivered on January 19, 1893, before the Scottish Society
of Literature and Art_.]


Brendan, the son of Finnlogh O' Alta, was born at Tralee in Kerry, in
the year 481 or 482.[1] He had a pedigree which connected him with the
rulers of Ireland, and thus perhaps secured for him a social prominence
which he would not otherwise have enjoyed. Nature seems to have endowed
him with an highly wrought and sensitive temperament. Putting aside
altogether the idealism which caused him, like so many others of his
time and race, to give himself to the Church, he displayed throughout
life a restlessness which led him to constant journeys, sometimes of the
nature of migrations, and the constant inception of projects to which he
did not continue long to adhere; and in the statements about him there
are elements from which I conjecture that he was probably of the class
of persons who furnish good subjects for hypnotic experiments. When he
was a year old he was handed over to the care of the nun Ita, when she
dwelt at the foot of Mount Luachra. With her he remained until he was
seven years old, when she sent him to Bishop Erc, by whom he had been
baptized, but during the whole of her life, which lasted nearly as long
as his own, he never ceased to regard and to treat her with all the
affectionate reverence of a son. His education was continued under Erc,
until he grew towards manhood, when he visited other parts of Ireland
for the sake of study, but it was to Erc that he returned to be
ordained to the Presbyterate. At that period there was a sort of passion
among the Celtic clergy for retiring into deserts after the manner of
the monks and hermits of Egypt, and the islands of the Western and
Northern ocean, if they could show nothing like the burning sands of