d in voyaging for two years; and at
length came to the island where he would be.' This island, however, is
only one with an old man dressed in feathers, who calls it 'an holy
land, polluted by no blood, open for the burial of no sinner, ... a land
like Eden,' but this seems to be the only Land of Promise which was
known to the biographer.

While, however, I willingly make a present of this passage to the
naturalistic interpreters, I do not accept their interpretation. As I
have said, I look upon Brendan's wanderings in the Western Isles soon
after his ordination, in search of a place wherein to found a monastery,
as the only scrap of historical basis, at any rate as far as he was
concerned, which the romance possesses. The Life says that he reached
many islands, but instances only two, one of these being the so-called
Land of Promise as above, and the incidents are not of a very startling
character. No one on the other hand will deny that the Voyage narrates a
series of incidents of a very startling character indeed, and it seems
to me beyond possibility that some of them, such as the Judas episode,
can have even a legendary basis, or be anything but pure, unmitigated,
intentional, avowed, undisguised fiction, like the incidents of any
novel of the present day. It seems to me that there is in the romance
more resemblance to Lucian's _Traveller's True Tale_ than is likely to
be accidental, and the Land of Promise indeed occupies a position
somewhat similar to that held by the Islands of the Blest in that
remarkable skit. Again I think that the Burning Island with its forges,
and its monstrous inhabitants hurling rocks into the sea after the
voyagers, and the great black volcano piercing the clouds, is very
suggestive of Etna and the Cyclopes as described in the Odyssey. It must
be remembered that Greek scholarship was a good deal cultivated in
antient Ireland. My own impression is that the author, whoever he was,
was a very pious man, who had read Homer and Lucian, and to whom it
occurred that it would be a nice thing to write an imaginary voyage
which might unite similar elements of interest and excitement with the
inculcation of Christian, religious, and moral sentiments. For his own
purposes he plagiarized them a little, and I am very far from wishing to
contend that it is impossible that he may also have worked in some vague
accounts of the wonders of America, which had reached his ears from the
adventurous voyages o