admirable engraving, of such minute and most delicate work that the beholder, instead of admiring the skill or prowess of the carver, is lost in amazement. The compartments are very circumscribed and small, and they are occupied by divers beasts, flowers, and images, which seem to be inserted, engraved, or furrowed out in the wood. This shrine is enclosed in another outer one, which is entirely covered by hides, and is surrounded and firmly bound by iron rails and bandages. The third, however, which is decorated with gold and precious stones, is placed above these, and, by means of indented flutings projecting from the second, for which, in due order, similar projections are fabricated in this, is closely attached and fastened to it by long iron nails. This cannot possibly be separated from the rest, because these nails can by no device be drawn out without fracture.’[559] The Irish shrine was probably not so elaborate, but it too, as we have seen, was decorated with silver and gold; and in the Life of St. Bridget, written probably in the first half of the ninth century, and attributed to Cogitosus, an account is given us of the shrines in the church of Kildare. We have seen that the remains of Conlaid, the first bishop of Kildare, were disinterred and enshrined in the year 799; and Cogitosus, in his description of the church of St. Bridget, says, ‘in which the glorious bodies both of Bishop Conleath and of this virgin St. Bridget repose on the right and left sides of the altar, placed in ornamented shrines decorated with various devices of gold and silver and gems and precious stones, with crowns of gold and silver hanging above them.’[560] If we are to look, then, to the period between the years 735 and 807 for the circumstances which led to the remains of St. Columba being disinterred, taken over to Ireland, and enshrined at the church of Saul Patrick, one of the nearest churches to Iona on the Irish coast, the most natural inference certainly is that they were connected with the piratical incursions of the Danes and the destruction of the original monastery by fire in 802. [Sidenote: A.D. 814-831. Diarmaid abbot of Iona. Monastery rebuilt with stone.]