hoever is curious to study the lives of the
saints in their originals, should rather go anywhere than
to the Bollandists, and universally never read a late life
when he can command an early one, for the genius in
them is in the ratio of their antiquity, and, like riverwater,
is most pure nearest to the fountain head. We
are lucky in possessing several specimens of the mode
of their growth in late and early lives of the same saints,
and the process in all is similar. Out of the lives of
St. Bride three are left; out of the sixty-six of
St. Patrick, there are eight; the first of each belonging
to the sixth century, the latest to the thirteenth. The
first are in verse; they belong to a time when there
was no one to write such things, and were popular in
form and popular in their origin--the flow is easy, the
style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to
prose is substantial as well as formal; the imagination is
ossified, and the exuberance of legendary creativeness
we exchange for the hard dogmatic record of fact without
reality, and fiction without grace. The marvellous
in the poetical lives is comparatively slight; the after
miracles being composed frequently out of a mistake of
poets' metaphors for literal truth. There is often real,
genial, human beauty in the old verse. The first two
stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's Hymn are of high
merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a
translation:--

"Bride the queen, she loved not the world;
She floated on the waves of the world
As the sea-bird floats upon the billow.

Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps
In the far land of her captivity,
Mourning for her child at home."

What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning
of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage.
The poetical "Life of St. Patrick," too, is full of fine,
wild, natural imagery. The boy is described as a
shepherd on the hills of Down, and there is a legend,
well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and leaving
a gigantic foot-print on a rock from which he
sprang into heaven. The legend, of course, rose from
some remarkable natural feature of the spot; but, as
it is told here, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and
it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the
boy. But in the prose all is crystalline; the story
is drawn out, with a barren prolixity of detail, into a
series of angelic visitations. And again, when Patrick
is described, as the after ap