that centres about him amounts in verse and prose to an immense bulk.
Much of this matter has of course very small historical value; but it
may be conceded that Patrick's traditional role as a law-maker and
reviser, in connection with the revision of the Brehon Law, deserves
serious attention. Similarly, though we do not accept more than a
small part of the poems attributed to him as really his, there is
enough to show him a poet, as well as a great teacher and preacher and
lawgiver. What is most to the purpose, perhaps, is that he made his
life a poem; so that the mediaeval scribes can hardly speak of him
without adorning and beautifying the tale they have to tell. Less
known but hardly less interesting is St. Columcill, whom Dr. Hyde
claims "to have been, both in his failings and his virtues, the most
typical of Irishmen; at once sentimental and impulsive, an eminent
type of the race he came from." Dr. Hyde goes on to relate, in
illustration of this, the tale of the heron in Iona:--When "he saw the
bird flying across the water from the direction of Ireland, and
alighting half frozen with cold and faint with flight upon the rocky
coast there, he sent out one of his monks to go round the island and
warm and cherish and feed the bird; 'because,' said he weeping, 'it
has come from the land I shall never see on earth again!'" Surely one
of the most touching sentences ever uttered in all the long series of
the lament of the Celt in exile!

The Lives of the Saints form altogether a most important and
characteristic section of Irish literature. Even when composed in
Latin, they remain so saturated with Celtic feeling and coloring that
they may fairly be counted among Irish books. Dr. Hyde names several
Latin lives of St. Patrick alone, ascribed to St. Benignus, St. Ultan,
St. Eleran, and others of his later followers. Of St. Columcill (St.
Columba), one of the fullest, written in Irish in the sixteenth
century, was compiled at Lifford under the direction of Manus
O'Donnell, Prince of Tirconnell; though Adamnan's Latin life of the
Saint is the most important book on the subject, written as it was
only a hundred years after the death of Columba, and by one who was
his spiritual successor as Abbot of Iona.

The Danish invasion of Ireland, lasting from the ninth to the eleventh
centuries, draws a red line across the history of its literature.
During that troubled period many of the most priceless of its MSS.
were destroyed, and