ng. Some buildings of the same sort
have been lately revealed in the island of Lewis: one is named Teampul
Rona, and another, which is dedicated to St Flannan, Teampul
Beannachadh.[81] The specialty of both these, as well as of the Irish
buildings, is that they are edifices beyond all question raised for
Christian worship, that they have been built with pains and skill, and
yet that they have no vestige of that earlier type of Christian
architecture which Europe in general obtained from Rome.

[Footnote 81: See Mr Muir's very curious volume on "Characteristics of
Old Church Architecture in the Mainland and Western Islands of
Scotland."]

In offering a few stray remarks on the lives of the saints, or, more
properly speaking, the missionaries, whose labours lay in the British
Isles, it would be pedantic to cite the precise document, printed
generally for one or other of the book clubs, which supplies the
authority for each sentence. I must, however, mention one authority
which stands supreme among its brethren--the edition of Adamnan's Life
of St Columba, edited by Dr Reeves, under the joint patronage of the
Irish Archaeological and the Bannatyne Clubs. The original work has long
been accepted as throwing a light on the Christianising of the North,
second only to that shed by the invaluable morsels in Bede. With
wonderful industry and learning, the editor has incorporated the small
book of Adamnan in a mass of new matter, every word of which is equally
instructive and interesting to the student.

There is no doubt that the saints of Irish origin supply by far the more
important portion of our hagiology. They are countless. Taking merely a
topographical estimate of them--looking, that is, to the names of places
which have been dedicated to them, or otherwise bear their names--we
find them crowding Ireland, and swarming over the Highlands of Scotland
and the north of England into London itself, where St Bride's Well has
given a gloomy perpetuity to the name of the first and greatest of Irish
female saints. Some people would be content to attribute the
frequentness of saintship among the Irish and the Highlanders to the
opportunities enjoyed by them in consequence of the early Church having
found a refuge in Ireland. Others would attribute the phenomenon to the
extreme susceptibility of the Celtic race to religious enthusiasm, and
would illustrate their views by referring to the present Celtic
population in Ireland under