le of St.
Patrick's Purgatory, transferred into the Continental languages, gave
origin to one of Calderon's Spanish dramas.

This voyage of Brendan was influential in another direction--in the
discovery of America. Columbus studied the narrative. Hrafn of Limerick,
the Norse voyager, thoroughly knew it, as did others of his nation, such
as Leif and his friends. But there is direct proof of its coercive power.
As you sail into Bristol, you must pass under a high hill which is known
to this day as St. Brendan's Hill.[7] There was a little chapel to St.
Brendan on its summit, because of the reverence which all seamen, whether
Norse, Saxon, or Celt, professed for the sailor-saint. Now, in 1480 two
British merchants equipped two ships to sail to the Isle of Brasylle in
the west of Ireland, but after nine weeks' vain voyaging they put into an
Irish port. The Bristol men (who were largely of Norse blood) were not
discouraged. In 1498, the Spaniard De Ayala informed his sovereign that
for seven years they had every year sent out two, three, or four light
ships in search of the Island of Brazil (_i.e._, the Irish "Hy-Breasail")
and the Seven Cities. The adventure was under the direction of Cabot, the
Genoese, who discovered the northern shore of America a year before
Columbus reached its more inviting isles. Thus, either St. Brendan's
voyage is a fact, and then he was the true First Discoverer; or it is a
fiction, and then it was the direct cause of that discovery. This were a
remarkable result of the power of the imaginative literature of the
ancient Irish. No other people on earth can claim the discovery of a
Continent as the result of a romance.

Whilst some of the early Christians deprecated the study of the pagan
classics, the Irish held large and more liberal views. This was
peculiarly true of St. Columbanus. Authoritative, inflexible, a daring
missionary, his royal mind embraced the wide domain of letters. His
eloquence is confessed. His monastic maxims are described as fit for a
brotherhood of philosophers, whilst his wit is shown in his lighter poems,
his culture in the adoption of old Greek metre, and his Irish training in
the terminal rhymes in the alliteration of many of his verses. The
following show both final rhymes and concordant initials:

"Dilexerunt =t=enebras =t=etras magis quam l_ucem_,
=I=mitari contemnunt vitae =D=ominum =d=_ucem_:
=V=elut in somnis =r=egnent una hora laet_antur_,
Sed =ae=terna