Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

PREFACE.

BEFORE St. Columba was long in the grave, it is likely that some member of the brotherhood set himself to collect his patron's acts, and to record such events of his life as were suited to the taste of the day, or were calculated to promote the veneration of his memory. In furtherance of this design, he probably turned his attention rather to the marvels than the sober realities of the Saint's life, and consulted more for the excitement of admiration in a simple and credulous age, than for the supply of historical materials to meet the stern demands of remote posterity. When Adamnan, a century after St. Columba's death, in compliance with his brethren's urgent request, drew up the memoir which has immortalized both the subject and the writer, his information was derived, as he himself states, in part from written, in part from oral, authorities. In the latter respect, he was quite near enough to the fountainhead, both in time and place, to draw from authentic sources, for in his boyhood he had frequent opportunities of conversing with those who had seen St. Columba, and he was now writing almost on the very spot where his great predecessor had indited his last words, and surrounded by objects every one of which was fresh with the impress of some interesting association. As regarded his documentary materials, he had before him the account of Cummene the Fair, whom he cites by name, and whose entire narrative he has transferred, almost verbatim, into his own compilation, where it is for the most part incorporated with the Third Book. He had also another memoir, on the authority of which he relates an occurrence not recorded in

[ocr errors]

Cummene's pages. Besides these compositions, which were written in Latin, there existed in our author's day certain poems on the praises of Columba, in the Scotic tongue, among which was probably the celebrated Amhra, or panegyric, which was written by a contemporary of the Saint. Baithene Mor, who enjoyed St. Columba's friendship, is said to have commemorated some particulars of his life, and poems ascribed to Baithene are ⚫ more than once referred to by O'Donnell. Metrical compositions bearing the name of St. Mura are also cited by the same compiler, who adduces them as his authority, in part, for the history of St. Columba's infancy. Thus furnished with record and tradition, and quickened, moreover, with zeal for the honour of a kinsman after the flesh, the ninth abbot of Hy became the biographer of the first, and produced a work, which, though not ostensibly historical, and professing to treat of an individual, is "the most authentic voucher now remaining of several other important particulars of the sacred and civil history of the Scots and Picts," and is pronounced by a writer not over-given to eulogy to be "the most complete piece of such biography that all Europe can boast of, not only at so early a period, but even through the whole middle ages."2 Our author is indeed as free from the defects of hagiology as any ancient writer in this department of literature, but it must ever be subject of regret that he chose an individual instead of a society as his subject, and reckoned the history of his Church a secondary consideration to the reputation of his Patron. If Bede had contented himself with being the biographer of St. Cuthbert, instead of the historian of England, would he be now par excellence the Venerable? If Adamnan had extended to history the style and power of description which appear in his tract on the Holy Places, with the experience, the feeling, and the piety, which characterize his Life of St. Columba, the voice of Christendom would have borrowed the word from his countryman, and irreversibly have 1 Innes, Civil and Eccl. Hist., p. 145.

* Pinkerton, Enquiry, Pref., vol. i. p. xlviii.

coupled his name with the title of Admirable. Even in the limited sphere which he chose, he soon acquired, to use a modern expression, a European celebrity, and the numerous copies of his writings which are found scattered over the Continent show in what esteem he was held abroad. It was therefore more rhetorical than just in a late historian of the English Church, to create a silent sister beside the vocal Lindisfarne, and state that "splendid as is the fame of Iona, the names of almost all its literary men have perished."1 Surely Adamnan and Cummene are more than names, and if names be wanting, the Chronicle of Hy is not so barren as to suggest the old lament

"Omnes illacrymabiles Urgentur, ignotique longa Nocte."

Adamnan's Life of St. Columba has obtained due publicity in print, yet has always appeared in such a form as to render it more a subject of research than of ordinary study. It was first printed by Henry Canisius, in the fifth volume of his Antique Lectiones, on the authority of a manuscript preserved in the monastery of Windberg in Bavaria. Twenty years afterwards, Thomas Messingham, an Irish priest, reprinted the tract from Canisius, in his Florilegium, adding titles to the chapters, and appending a few marginal glosses, together with testimonies of Adamnan, at the beginning, and of St. Columba, at the end, of the Life.

About the same time, Stephen White, a learned Jesuit, a native of Clonmel, discovered, while in search of Irish manuscripts on the Continent, a venerable copy of Adamnan in the Benedictine monastery of Reichenau, and the transcript which he made supplied the text of the fourth Life of St. Columba in Colgan's Trias Thaumaturga, published in 1647. The editor of the work prefixes numbers to the chapters, which are not in the original, and errs wherever White has made an omission or

1 Carwithen, Hist. of the Church, v. i. p. 6.

« AnteriorContinuar »