There are six lives of Columcille still extant, the greatest of them all being that in Latin by Adamnan,[25] who was one of his successors in the abbacy of Iona, and who was born only twenty-seven years after Columcille's death. This admirable work, written in flowing and very fair Latin, was derived, as Adamnan himself tells us, partly from oral and partly from written sources. A memoir of Columcille had already been written by Cuimine Finn or Cummeneus Albus,[26] as Adamnan calls him, the last Abbot of Iona but one before himself, and that memoir he almost entirely embodied in his third book. He had also some other written accounts before him, and the Irish poems, both of the saint himself and of other bards, amongst them Baithine Mór, who had enjoyed his personal friendship, and St. Mura, who was a little his junior--poems now lost. He had also constant opportunities of conversing with those who had seen the great saint and had been familiar with him in life, and he was writing on the spot and amidst the associations and surroundings wherein his last thirty years had been spent, and which were inseparably connected with his memory. The result was that he produced a work, which although not ostensibly a history, and dealing only with the life of a single man, and that rather from the transcendental than from the practical side, is nevertheless of the utmost value to the historian on account not only of the general picture of manners and customs, but still more on account of its incidental references to contemporary history. "It is," says Pinkerton, who, as Dr. Reeves remarks, was a writer not over-given to eulogy, "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." Adamnan's other great work on Sacred Places is mentioned by his contemporary, the Venerable Bede, but he is silent as to Columcille's life. There is, however, abundant internal evidence of its authenticity. This evidence, however it might satisfy the minds of mere Irish students like Colgan and Stephen White, proved insufficient, however, to meet the exacting claims of certain British scholars. "I cannot agree," said Sir James Dalrymple, in the last century, "that the authority of Adamnanus is equal, far less preferable to that of Bede, since it was agreed on all hands to be a fabulous history lately published in his name, and that he was remarkable for nothing, but that he was the first abbot of that monastery who quit the _Scottish_ institution, and became fond of the _English Romish_ Rites."[27] Dr. Giles, too, who thought of editing it, tells us in his translation of Bede's "Ecclesiastical History," that he had "strong doubts of Adamnan's having written it."[28] And, finally, Schoell, a German, professed to have convinced himself that Adamnan's preface could not have been written by the same hand which wrote the life, so different