the "Lives" is their very evident effort to exalt and glorify the saint at any cost.  With this end of glorification in view the hagiographer is prepared to swallow everything and record anything.  He has, in fact, no critical sense and possibly he would regard possession of such a sense as rather an evil thing and use of it as irreverent.  He does not, as a consequence, succeed in presenting us with a very life-like or convincing portrait of either the man or the saint.  Indeed the saint, as drawn in the Lives, is, as already hinted, a very unsaintlike individual—almost as ready to curse as to pray and certainly very much more likely to smite the aggressor than to present to him the other cheek.  In the text we shall see St. Mochuda, whose Life is a specially sane piece of work, cursing on the same occasion, first, King Blathmac and the Prince of Cluain, then, the rich man Cronan who sympathised with the eviction, next an individual named Dubhsulach who winked insolently at him, and finally the people of St. Columba's holy city of Durrow who had stirred up hostile feeling against him.  Even gentle female saints can hurl an imprecation too.  St. Laisrech, for instance, condemned the lands of those who refused her tribute, to—nettles, elder shrub, and corncrakes!  It is pretty plain that the compilers of the lives had some prerogatives, claims or rights to uphold—hence this frequent insistence on the evil of resisting the Saint and presumably his successors.

    One characteristic of the Irish ascetics appears very clear through all the exaggeration and all the biographical absurdity; it is their spirit of intense mortification.  To understand this we have only to study one of the ancient Irish Monastic Rules or one of the Irish Penitentials as edited by D'Achery ("Spicilegium") or Wasserschleben ("Irische Kanonensamerlung").  Severest fasting, unquestioning obedience and perpetual self renunciation were inculcated by the Rules and we have ample evidence that they were observed with extraordinary fidelity.  The Rule of Maelruin absolutely forbade the use of meat or of beer.  Such a prohibition a thousand years ago was an immensely more grievous thing than it would sound to-day.  Wheaten bread might partially supply the place of meat to-day, but meat was easier to procure than bread in the eighth century.  Again, a thousand years ago, tea or coffee there was none and even milk was often difficult or impossible to procure in winter.  So severe in fact was the fast that religious sometimes died of it.  Bread and water being found insufficient to sustain life and health, gruel was substituted in some monasteries and of this monastic gruel there were three varieties:—(a) "gruel upon water" in which the liquid was so thick that the meal reached the surface, (b) "gruel between two waters" in which the meal, while it did not rise to the surface, did not quite fall to the bottom, and (c) "gruel under water" which was so weak and so badly boiled that he meal easily fell to the bottom.  In the case of penitents the first brand of gruel was prescribed for light offences, the second kind for sins of ordinary gravity, and the "gruel under water" for extraordinary crimes (vid. Messrs. Gwynne and Purton on the Rule of Maelruin, &c.)  The most implicit, exact and prompt obedience was prescribed and observed.  An overseer of Mochuda's monastery at Rahen had occasion to order by name a young monk called Colman to do something which involved his wading into a river.  Instantly a dozen Colmans plunged into the water.  Instances of extraordinary penance abound, beside which the austerities of Simon Stylites almost pale.  The Irish saints' love of solitude was also a very marked characteristic.  Desert places and solitary islands of the ocean possessed an apparently wonderful fascination for them.  The more inaccessible or forbidding the island the more it was in request as a penitential retreat.  There is hardly one of the hundred islands around the Irish coast which, one time or another, did not harbour some saint or solitary upon its rocky bosom.

    The testimony of the "Lives" to the saints' love and practice of prayer is borne out by the evidence of more trustworthy documents.  Besides private prayers, the whole psalter seems to have been recited each day, in three parts of fifty psalms each.  In addition, an immense number of Pater Nosters was prescribed.  The office and prayers were generally pretty liberally interspersed with genuflexions or prostrations, of which a certain anchorite performed as many as seven hundred daily.  Another penitential action which accompanied prayer was the cros-figul.  This was an extension of the arms in the shape of a cross; if anyone wants to know how difficult a practice this is let him try it for, say, fifteen minutes.  Regarding recitation of the Divine Office it was of counsel, and probably of precept, that is should not be from memory merely, but that the psalms should all be read.  For this a good reason was given by Maelruin, i.e. that the recitation might engage the eye as well as the tongue and thought.  An Irish homily refers to the mortification of the saints and religious of the time as martyrdom, of which it distinguishes three kinds—red, white, and blue.  Red martyrdom was death for the faith; white martyrdom was the discipline of fasting, labour and bodily austerities; while blue martyrdom was abnegation of the will and heartfelt sorrow for sin.

    One of the puzzles of Irish hagiology is the great age attributed to certain saints—periods of two hundred, three hundred, and even four hundred years.  Did the original compilers of the Life intend this?  Whatever the full explanation be the writers of the Lives were clearly animated by a desire to make their saint cotemporary and, if possible, a disciple, of one or other of the great monastic founders, or at any rate to prove him a pupil of one of the great schools of Erin.  There was special anxiety to connect the saint with Bangor or Clonard.  To effect the connection in question it was sometimes necessary to carry the life backwards, at other times to carry it forwards, and occasionally to lengthen it both backwards and forwards.  Dr. Chas. O'Connor gives a not very convincing explanation of the three-hundred-year "Lives," scil.:—that the saint lived in three centuries—during the whole of one century and in the end and beginning respectively of the preceding and succeeding centuries.  This explanation, even if satisfactory for the three-hundred-year Lives, would not help at all towards the Lives of four hundred years.  A common explanation is that the scribe mistook numerals in the MS. before him and wrote the wrong figures.  There is no doubt that copying is a fruitful source of error as regards numerals.  It is much more easy to make a mistake in a numeral than in a letter; the context will enable one to correct the letter, while it will give him no clue as regards a numeral.  On the subject of the alleged longevity of Irish Saints Anscombe has recently been elaborating in Eriu a new and very ingenious theory.  Somewhat unfortunately the author happens to be a rather frequent propounder of ingenious theories.  His explanation is briefly—the use and confusion of different systems of chronology.  He alleges that the original writers used what is called the Diocletian Era or the "Era of the Martyrs" as the terminus a quo of their chronological system and, in support of his position, he adduces the fact that this, which was the most ancient of all ecclesiastical eras, was the era used by the schismatics in Britain and that it was introduced by St. Patrick.

    As against the contradiction, anachronisms and extravagances of the Lives we have to put the fact that generally speaking the latter corroborate one another, and that they receive extern corroboration from the annals.  Such disagreements as occur are only what one would expect to find in documents dealing with times so remote.