scent. But
of the casual persons mentioned in the Life of Columba, Dr Reeves hunts
out the genealogy--fully as successfully, one would say, as that of any
person of the country-gentleman class in Britain, living at the
beginning of this century, could be established. There are, indeed, many
characteristics in the hagiologic literature bearing an analogy to
modern social habits so close as to be almost ludicrous; and it is not
easy to deal with these conditions of a very distant age, brought to us
as they are through the vehicle of a language which is neither classical
nor vernacular, but conventional--the corrupt Latin in which the
biographers of the saints found it convenient to write. It would appear
that when he was in Ireland, St Columba kept his carriage, and the loss
of the lynch-pin on one occasion is connected with a notable miracle. Dr
Reeves, as appropriate to this, remarks that "the memoirs of St Patrick
in the Book of Armagh make frequent mention of his chariot, and even
name his driver." It is difficult to suppose such a vehicle ever
becoming available in Iona; but there Columba seems to have been
provided with abundance of vessels, and he could send for a friend, in
the way in which MacGillicallum's "carriage," in the form of a boat, was
sent for Johnson and Boswell.

There are many other things in these books which have a sound more
familiar to us than any sense which they really convey. Here the saint
blesses the store of a "homo plebeius cum uxore et filiis"--a poor man
with a wife and family--a term expressively known in this day among all
who have to deal with the condition of their fellow-men, from the
chancellor of the exchequer to the relieving-officer. In the same
chapter we are told "de quodam viro divite tenacissimo"--of a very
hard-fisted rich fellow--a term thoroughly significant in civilised
times. He is doomed, by the way, to become bankrupt, and fall into such
poverty that his offspring will be found dead in a ditch--a fate also
intelligible in the nineteenth century. In another place we have among
the saint's suitors "plebeius pauperrimus, qui in ea habitabat regione
quae Stagni litoribus Aporici est contermina." The "Stagnum Aporicum" is
Lochaber; so here we have a pauper from the neighbourhood of Lochaber--a
designation which I take to be familiarly known at "the Board of
Supervision for the Relief of the Poor in Scotland." We are told, too,
of the saint being at a plebeian feast, and of