glory that has no end.

These legends are to be found chiefly in several very ancient lives
of Saint Patrick, the most valuable of which is the "Tripartite
Life," ascribed by Colgan to the century after the Saint's death,
though it has not escaped later interpolations. The work was long
lost, but two copies of it were re-discovered, one of which has been
recently translated by that eminent Irish scholar, Mr. Hennessy.
Whether regarded from the religious or the philosophic point of
view, few things can be more instructive than the picture which it
delineates of human nature at a period of critical transition, and
the dawning of the Religion of Peace upon a race barbaric, but far
indeed from savage. That wild race regarded it doubtless as a
notable cruelty when the new Faith discouraged an amusement so
popular as battle; but in many respects they were in sympathy with
that Faith. It was one in which the nobler affections, as well as
the passions, retained an unblunted ardour; and where Nature is
strongest and least corrupted it most feels the need of something
higher than itself, its interpreter and its supplement. It prized
the family ties, like the Germans recorded by Tacitus; and it could
not but have been drawn to Christianity, which consecrated them.
Its morals were pure, and it had not lost that simplicity to which
so much of spiritual insight belongs. Admiration and wonder were
among its chief habits; and it would not have been repelled by
Mysteries in what professed to belong to the Infinite. Lawless as
it was, it abounded also in loyalty, generosity, and self-sacrifice;
it was not, therefore, untouched by the records of martyrs, examples
of self-sacrifice, or the doctrine of a great Sacrifice. It loved
children and the poor; and Christianity made the former the
exemplars of faith, and the latter the eminent inheritors of the