express pre-eminence and superiority in the spiritual office. The ablest of our critics regard the poem as the genuine composition of Fiacc of Sletty, the friend and contemporary of Patrick, written shortly after his death in A.D. 493; and hence the earliest and most authentic biography of the saint that has come down to us. It is, moreover, a document of supreme importance, for competent judges, like O'Curry, have pronounced it to be written in pure and perfect Gaedhlic. "It bears internal evidence," says O'Curry, "of a high degree of perfection in the language, at the time it was composed; it is unquestionably in all respects a genuine native production, quite untinctured with the Latin or with any other contemporary style or idiom." This is a most important fact, because in our opinion it settles the question as to the use of letters and writing in Ireland before St. Patrick. No language could by any possibility in one or two generations be developed from being the rude unwritten jargon of an unlettered people into a perfect written language of artistic structure with definite grammatical form and arrangement. That the poem of Fiacc is an elaborate composition of this character, indicating not only the existence of settled grammatical forms, but also a great richness and flexibility in the language, even the merest tyro in the Gaedhlic tongue can perceive. Indeed in every respect it is much superior to the debased Gaedhlic of the last three centuries. This important poem was first printed by John Colgan, the father of Irish hagiology. It has been reprinted much more accurately from the copy in the Liber Hymnorum, T.C.D., and also in the _Irish Ecclesiastical Record_ for March, 1868, where the philological student will find not only the text and glosses, but also an accurate translation from the pen of one of our most eminent Celtic scholars, Eugene O'Curry of the Catholic University of Dublin. More recently the poem has been printed in Stokes' _Tripartite_ (Rolls Series), and in Haddan and Stubbs' _Councils_, etc. VII.--THE SAYINGS OF ST. PATRICK. In the _Book of Armagh_ there is a paragraph headed--Dicta Patritii--or Sayings of St. Patrick. They appear to have been certain sayings which were frequently on the lips of the apostle, and which came to be handed down to posterity as expressive of his apostolic spirit. Brief and few as they are, these spiritual maxims have been well chosen, and may be said to govern in their application the whole life of the individual Christian, as well as of the Irish Church.