He says nothing of his training, or his ordination, or his long sojourn in Gaul, or of St. Germanus, with whom he studied according to the "Lives," but he alludes incidentally to his wish to see his parents and his native Britain, and to revisit the brethren in Gaul, and to see the face of God's saints there; but though he desired all this, he would not leave his beloved converts, but would spend the rest of his life amongst them.[17] From this brief _résumé_ of the celebrated "Confession" it will be seen that it is the perfervid outpouring of a zealous early Christian, anxious only to clear himself from the charges of worldliness or carelessness, and absolutely devoid of those appeals to general interest which we meet with in most of such memoirs, but there is a vein of warm piety running through the whole, and an abundance of scriptural quotations--all, of course, from the ante-Hieronymian or pre-Vulgate version, another proof of antiquity--which has caused it to be remarked that a forger might, perhaps, write equally bad Latin, but could hardly "forge the spirit that breathes in the language which is the manifest outpourings of a heart like unto the heart of St. Paul."[18] There are two other pieces of literature assigned to St. Patrick, as well as the "Confession"; these are the "Epistle to Coroticus" in Latin, and the "Deer's Cry" in Irish. The Epistle is not found in the Book of Armagh, but it is found in other MSS. as old as the tenth or eleventh century, and bears such close resemblance in style and language to the "Confession," whole phrases actually occurring in both, that it also has generally been regarded as genuine.[19] There is some doubt as to who Coroticus was, but he seems to have been a semi-Christian king of Dumbarton who, along with some Scots, _i.e._, Irish, and the Southern Picts who had fallen away from Christianity, raided the eastern shores of Ireland and carried off a number of St. Patrick's newly-converted Christians, leaving the white garments of the neophytes stained with blood, and hurrying into captivity numbers upon whose foreheads the holy oil of confirmation was still glistening. The first letter was to ask Coroticus to restore the captives, and when this request was derided the next was sent, excommunicating him and all his aiders and abettors, calling upon all Christians neither to eat nor drink in their company until they had made expiation for their crimes. Patrick himself had, he here explains, preached the gospel to the Irish nation for the sake of God, though they had made him a captive and destroyed the men-servants and maids of his father's house. He had been born a freedman and a noble, the son of a decurio or prefect, but he had sold his nobility for others and regretted it not. His lament over the loss of his converts is touching: "Oh! my most beautiful and most loving brothers and children whom in countless numbers I have begotten