Then Patrick in passionate grief bewails the fate of the captives. "Oh! my most beautiful and most loving brothers and children, whom in countless numbers I have begotten for Christ, what shall I do for you? Am I so unworthy before God and man that I cannot help you? Is it a crime to have been born in Ireland? And have not we the same God as they have? I sorrow for you--yet I rejoice--for if you are taken from the world, you were believers through me, and are gone to Paradise." And then in the last paragraph he expresses a hope that God will inspire those wicked men with penance, and that they will restore their captives, and save themselves for this world and for the world to come. Like the Confession, this letter abounds in quotations from the old version of the Bible before it was corrected by St. Jerome. In the Brussels MS. of the _Book of Armagh_ there is a chapter which purports to give an account of "Patrick's conflict against the King of Aloo," whom it calls _Coirthech_, and a little lower down the name is given as Corictic. When Patrick failed to convert him by his letters and admonitions, which the tyrant despised, he besought the Lord to drive this reprobate "from this world and from the next." A very short time afterwards, as Coroticus was sitting on his throne, he heard a certain magic song chanted, and hearing it he came down from his seat in the hall of justice. Thereupon all his nobles took up the same chant; whereupon suddenly in the midst of the market place, Coroticus was changed into what seemed a fox in the presence of them all, and running away like a stream of water disappeared from their eyes, and was never afterwards heard of. III.--THE LORICA, OR THE DEER'S CRY. The Lorica, or Shield of St. Patrick, is a rhythmical prayer said to have been composed by the Saint to implore the divine protection, when he and his companions were approaching Tara for the first time to proclaim the unknown God in the very stronghold of druidism, sustained as it was by all the power of the Ard-righ of Erin. It was a bold and perilous thing to do--thus to face the pagan king and his idol priests on the very threshold of their citadel; and it shows how strongly armed in faith St. Patrick was on that day, when he so dared to bid defiance to the powers of darkness. The Saint was by no means insensible of the danger to which he exposed himself, nor of the strength of the wily foe whom he challenged so boldly to the combat. But he put his confidence not in man but in God, and this poem is simply the poetic expression of the sentiments which filled and strengthened his soul on that momentous occasion. This is the key to the meaning of the poem--"It was to be a corslet of faith for the protection of body and soul against devils, and human beings, and vices; and whoever shall sing it every day with pious meditation on God, devils shall not stay before him."[96]