[8] Father O'Hanlon, in his great work on the Irish saints, has pointed out a large number of close parallels between Fursa's vision and Dante's poem which seem altogether too striking to be fortuitous. (_See_ vol. i. pp. 115-120.) There are a poem and a litany attributed to St. Fursa in the MS. H. 1. 11. in Trinity College, Dublin. The visions of Purgatory seen by Dryhthelm, a monk of Melrose, as recorded by Bede, which are later than St. Fursa's vision, are conceived very much in the same style, only are much more doctrinal in their purgatorial teaching. "Tracing the course of thought upwards," says Sir Francis Palgrave ("History of Normandy and England"), "we have no difficulty in deducing the poetic genealogy of Dante's 'Inferno' to the Milesian Fursæus." [9] _See_ above, p. 97. [10] The same story, as Whitley Stokes points out, is told in two ninth-century lives of St. Machut, so that a tenth-century version of Sindbad's first voyage cannot have been the origin of it. [11] This is evidently the passage upon which Keating's description of hell in the "Three Shafts of Death," Leabh. III. allt. ix., x., xi., is modelled. He quite outdoes his predecessor in declamation and exuberance of alliterative adjectives. Compare also the description in the vision of Adamnan of the infernal regions as it is elaborated in the copy in the Leabhar Breac, in contradistinction to the more sober colouring of the older Leabhar na h-Uidhre. [12] Beginning:-- "Celebra Juda festa Christi gaudia Apostulorum exultans memoria. Claviculari Petri primi pastoris Piscium rete evangelii corporis Alleluia." This hymn, says Dr. Todd, "bears evident marks of the high antiquity claimed for it, and there seem no reasonable grounds for doubting its authenticity." [13] "The correct system lays down three principles. First, Easter day must be always a Sunday, never on but _next after_ the fourteenth day of the moon; secondly, that fourteenth day of the full moon should be that on or next after the vernal equinox; and thirdly, the equinox itself was invariably assigned to the 21st of March" (Dr. Healy's "Ireland's Schools and Scholars," p. 234). At Rome the 18th had been regarded as the equinox; St. Patrick, however, rightly laid it down that the equinox took place on the 21st. [14] Late professor of Ecclesiastical History in Dublin University. _See_ "Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy," May, 1892, p. 195. [15] The first verse runs thus:-- "Ni beir Luimneach for a druim Di sil Muimhneach i Leth Cuinn Marbán in noi bu fiú do Do Cuimmine mac Fiachno"-- "The lower Shannon bears not upon its surface, of Munster race in Leath Cuinn, any corpse in boat, equal to him, to Cuimin, son of Fiachna." His corpse was apparently brought home by water. [16] There is a verse ascribed to Ciaran in the "Chronicon Scotorum," beginning "Darerca mo mháthair-si," and a poem ascribed to him in H. 1. 11. Trinity College, Dublin.