and copying every valuable MS. he
could lay hands on; then transmitting the copy to his co-worker in
Louvain. AEdh son of Ward died too soon to carry out fully his part of
the undertaking: but another Irish Franciscan, Father Colgan, took up
the task; and it was he who gave the book its present title, 'The
Annals of the Four Masters,' calling it after the four men who chiefly
collaborated in the work, viz., Michael O'Clery, Farfassa O'Mulconry,
Peregrine O'Clery, and Peregrine O'Duigenan. The Annals, thus
laboriously brought to a triumphant close, carry history back to the
Deluge, and down to the years contemporary with their compilers and
authors, and the early part of the seventeenth century. "There is no
event of Irish history," says Dr. Hyde, "from the birth of Christ to
the beginning of the seventeenth century, that the first inquiry of
the student will not be--What do the Four Masters say about it?" The
Annals indeed present in their curiously epitomized and synchronized
pages the concentrated essence of thousands of the confused MSS. which
the Four Masters collated, sifted, and interpreted with consummate art
and intelligence. They wrote, we may add, in an archaic, almost
cryptic style, full of bardic euphemisms and other difficulties; so
that it is fortunate even for Celtic scholars that O'Donovan's seven
great volumes, in his quarto edition, present the text with an
accompanying English translation.

The more one compares the great work of the Four Masters with other
succeeding works of the same historical order, the more one sees how
great was the effect upon Irish literature of the growth of Christian
influence. St. Patrick's are the world-wide name and fame which most
clearly mark the early Christian history of Ireland, when the new
divine creed entered into the land and confronted the Celtic paganism.
Many are the exquisite legends of St. Patrick, often so naively and so
tenderly told; with glimmerings here and there already of the humor
which we connect so much with the Irish temper of mind, and which
received probably its greatest stimulus when an Irishman of earlier
times wished, in all courtesy, to reconcile his old fighting instincts
with the Christian gentleness and self-sacrifice. This as it may be,
the hagiology of the mediaeval Irishman is in delightful contrast to
the tales of battle and foray in the three great cycles of early
romance. As for St. Patrick, the legendary and apocryphal literature