ompile the acts of the saints with greater industry than judgment. They
collected all they could find among the uncertain traditions of the
natives and in obscure Irish writings, following the example of Jocelin,
whose work on the acts of St. Patrick had been received everywhere with
wonderful applause. But many of them have miserably failed, so that the
foolish have laughed at them, and the wise been filled with indignation."
("Bollandi Acta," 5th of March, p. 390, B). In the same work (p. 392, A),
it is pointed out that the Irish monks, whenever they heard of any saints
in other parts of England whose names and lives reminded them of Irish
saints, at once concluded that they were of Irish origin; and that the
people in some parts of England, as they possessed no written acts of
their popular saints, were glad to identify their own with the famous
saints of the Irish Church. This has evidently happened in the case of St.
Piran. St. Piran, in one of his characters, is certainly a truly Cornish
saint; but when the monks in Cornwall heard the wonderful legends of the
Irish saint, St. Kiran, they seem to have grafted their own St. Piran on
the Irish St. Kiran. The difference in the names must have seemed less to
them than to us; for words which in Cornish are pronounced with _p_, are
pronounced, as a rule, in Irish with _k_. Thus, head in Cornish is _pen_,
in Irish _ceann_, son is _map_, in Irish _mac_. The town built at the
eastern extremity of the wall of Severus, was called _Penguaul_, _i.e._
_pen_, caput, _guaul_, walls; the English call it _Penel-tun_, while in
Scotch it was pronounced _Cenail_.(71) That St. Kiran had originally
nothing to do with St. Piran can still be proved, for the earlier Lives of
St. Kiran, though full of fabulous stories, represent him as dying in
Ireland. His saint's day was the 5th of March; that of St. Piran, the 2d
of May. The later Lives, however, though they say nothing as yet of the
millstone, represent St. Kiran, when a very old man, as suddenly leaving
his country in order that he might die in Cornwall. We are told that
suddenly, when already near his death, he called together his little
flock, and said to them: "My dear brothers and sons, according to a divine
disposition I must leave Ireland and go to Cornwall, and wait for the end
of my life there. I cannot resist the will of God." He then sailed to
Cornwall, and built himself a house, where he performed many miracles. He
was buried in