t
copies are only recensions of a single original. Some of the MSS. are
parchment but the majority are in paper; some Lives again are merely
fragments and no doubt scores if not hundreds of others have been
entirely lost. Of many hundreds of our Irish saints we have only the
meagre details supplied by the martyrologies, with perhaps occasional
reference to them in the Lives of other saints. Again, finally, the
memory of hundreds and hundreds of saints additional survives only in
place names or is entirely lost.

There still survive probably over a hundred "Lives"--possibly one
hundred and fifty; this, however, does not imply that therefore we have
Lives of one hundred or one hundred and fifty saints, for many of the
saints whose Acts survive have really two sets of the latter--one in
Latin and the other in Irish; moreover, of a few of the Latin Lives and
of a larger number of the Irish Lives we have two or more recensions.
There are, for instance, three independent Lives of St. Mochuda and one
of these is in two recensions.

The surviving Lives naturally divide themselves into two great
classes--the Latin Lives and the Irish,--written in Latin and Irish
respectively. We have a Latin Life only of some saints, and Irish Life
only of others, and of others again we have a Latin Life and an Irish.
It may be necessary to add the Acts which have been translated into Latin
by Colgan or the Bollandists do not of course rank as Latin Lives.
Whether the Latin Lives proper are free translations of the Irish Lives
or the Irish Lives translations of Latin originals remains still, to a
large extent, an open question. Plummer ("Vitae SSm. Hib.," Introd.)
seems to favour the Latin Lives as the originals. His reasoning here
however leaves one rather unconvinced. This is not the place to go into
the matter at length, but a new bit of evidence which makes against the
theory of Latin originals may be quoted; it is furnished by the well
known collection of Latin Lives known as the Codex Salmanticensis, to
which are appended brief marginal notes in mixed middle Irish and Latin.
One such note to the Life of St. Cuangus of Lismore (recte Liathmore)
requests a prayer for him who has translated the Life out of the Irish
into Latin. If one of the Lives, and this a typical or characteristic
Life, be a translation, we may perhaps assume that the others, or most
of them, are translations also. In any case we may assume as certain
that ther