genial, human beauty in the old verse. The first two stanzas, for instance, of St. Bride's Hymn are of high merit, as may, perhaps, be imperfectly seen in a translation:-- "Bride the queen, she loved not the world; She floated on the waves of the world As the sea-bird floats upon the billow. Such sleep she slept as the mother sleeps In the far land of her captivity, Mourning for her child at home." What a picture is there of the strangeness and yearning of the poor human soul in this earthly pilgrimage. The poetical "Life of St. Patrick," too, is full of fine, wild, natural imagery. The boy is described as a shepherd on the hills of Down, and there is a legend, well told, of the angel Victor coming to him, and leaving a gigantic foot-print on a rock from which he sprang into heaven. The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature of the spot; but, as it is told here, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy. But in the prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations. And again, when Patrick is described, as the after apostle, raising the dead Celts to life, the metaphor cannot be left in its natural force, and we have a long weary list of literal deaths and literal raisings. And so in many ways the freshness and individuality is lost with time. The larger saints swallowed up the smaller and appropriated their exploits; chasms were supplied by an ever ready imagination; and, like the stock of good works laid up for general use, there was a stock of miracles ever ready when any defect was to be supplied. So it was that, after the first impulse, the progressive fire of a saint rolled on like a snow-ball down a mountain-side, gathering up into itself whatever lay in its path, fact or legend, appropriate or inappropriate, sometimes real jewels of genuine old tradition, sometimes the debris of the old creeds and legends of heathenism; and on, and on, till at length it reached the bottom, and was dashed in pieces on the Reformation.