By combining with all the collected and credible statements concerning him illustrative matter from the history of his times and the biographies of his contemporaries, it would no doubt be possible to write a life of Brendan, which would be both of considerable bulk and of considerable interest. But there would be nothing particularly startling or striking about it. Apart from the interest of public events contemporary with his long career, the monotonous variety produced by his vagabond nature, and such psychical interest as might possibly attach to stories of his mediumistic temperament, it would be rather hum-drum. Brendan, however, has had the ill luck to be selected by some unknown antient Irish novelist as the hero of a romance of the wildest kind, which has certainly spread his name, if not his fame, in quarters which in all his travels he could never have anticipated. Even in the Canary Islands, the natives apply the term 'Isla de San Borondon' to a peculiar effect like mirage, showing a shadowy presentiment of land, which is sometimes seen off their coasts. His character as an hero of romance, somewhat of the type of Sinbad the Sailor, if not of that of Gulliver, has even injured him as a subject of serious study. There has been a sort of custom, to which may be applied a celebrated phrase of Newman, 'aged but not venerable,' of confounding the hero of the romance with the real man. It would be just as proper to identify the hero of the _Pickwick Papers_ with a certain Mr. Pickwick, whom it was, oddly enough, the duty of one of Dickens' sons to call as a witness in an English law-suit not many years ago. Even Homer sometimes nods--at least according to the critics, of whose opinion Lucian credits him with so low an estimation--and the great Bollandists had their historical equanimity--much as experience must have already taught it to bear--so upset by the brilliancy of the fable that they have omitted to print the real life at all, a life which is, at the worst, no more startling than a good many with which they have enriched their pages--e.g., those of Patrick, Brigid, and Columba--and after a denunciation of what their authorities call the _vana, fictaque vel apocrypha deliramenta_, 'the silly, lying, or apocryphal ravings,' simply proceed to give a compilation of isolated notices drawn from a variety of different sources.