e were original Irish materials or data from which the formal
Lives (Irish or Latin) were compiled.

The Latin Lives are contained mainly in four great collections. The
first and probably the most important of these is in the Royal Library
at Brussels, included chiefly in a large MS. known as 'Codex
Salmanticensis' from the fact that it belonged in the seventeenth
century to the Irish College of Salamanca. The second collection is in
Marsh's Library, Dublin, and the third in Trinity College Library. The
two latter may for practical purposes be regarded as one, for they are
sister MSS.--copied from the same original. The Marsh's Library
collection is almost certainly, teste Plummer, the document referred to
by Colgan as Codex Kilkenniensis and it is quite certainly the Codex
Ardmachanus of Fleming. The fourth collection (or the third, if we take
as one the two last mentioned,) is in the Bodleian at Oxford amongst
what are known as the Rawlinson MSS. Of minor importance, for one
reason or another, are the collections of the Franciscan Library,
Merchants' Quay, Dublin, and in Maynooth College respectively. The
first of the enumerated collections was published 'in extenso,' about
twenty-five years since, by the Marquis of Bute, while recently the gist
of all the Latin collections has been edited with rare scholarship by
Rev. Charles Plummer of Oxford. Incidentally may be noted the one
defect in Mr. Plummer's great work--its author's almost irritating
insistence on pagan origins, nature myths, and heathen survivals.
Besides the Marquis of Bute and Plummer, Colgan and the Bollandists have
published some Latin Lives, and a few isolated "Lives" have been
published from time to time by other more or less competent editors.

The Irish Lives, though more numerous than the Latin, are less
accessible. The chief repertorium of the former is the Burgundian or
Royal Library, Brussels. The MS. collection at Brussels appears to have
originally belonged to the Irish Franciscans of Louvain and much of it
is in the well-known handwriting of Michael O'Clery. There are also
several collections of Irish Lives in Ireland--in the Royal Irish
Academy, for instance, and Trinity College Libraries. Finally, there
are a few Irish Lives at Oxford and Cambridge, in the British Museum,
Marsh's Library, &c., and in addition there are many Lives in private
hands. In this connection it can be no harm, and may do some good, to
note that an app