The text of the First Latin Life (here called for convenience of reference LA) is found in an early fifteenth-century MS. in Marsh's Library, Dublin. It has been edited, without translation, by the Rev. C. Plummer in his most valuable _Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae_ (Oxford, 1910) vol. i, pp. 200-216. The translation given in this volume has been made from Plummer's edition, which I have collated with the original MS.[5] The text of the Second Latin Life (LB) is contained in two MSS. in the Bodleian Library (Rawl. B 485 and Rawl. B 505, here called R1 and R2). Of these R2 is a direct copy of R1, as has been proved by Plummer, in his description of these manuscripts.[6] As to their date, there is no agreement; the estimate for R1 ranges from the first half of the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, R2 being necessarily somewhat later. The Life of Ciaran contained in these MSS. has been used by Plummer in editing LA, and extracts from it are printed in his footnotes. It has not, however, been previously printed in its entirety, and a transcript made by myself is therefore added here, in an Appendix. The text of the Third Latin Life (LC) is contained in the well-known Brussels MS., called _Codex Salmaticensis_ from its former sojourn at Salamanca. It is of the fourteenth century. This was the only continuous authority at the disposal of the compiler of the Bollandist life of our saint; he speaks of it in the most contemptuous terms. The life of Ciaran in this manuscript is a mere fragment, evidently copied from an imperfect exemplar; there seems to have been a chasm in the middle, and there is a lacuna at the end, which the scribe has endeavoured to conceal by adding the words "Finit, Amen." The translation here given has been prepared from the edition of the Salamanca MS. by de Smedt and de Backer, cols. 155-160. The Irish Life (here denoted VG, i.e. _Vita Goedelica_) was edited by Whitley Stokes from the late fifteenth-century MS. called the _Book of Lismore._[7] The numerous errors in the Lismore text may be to some extent corrected by collation with another Brussels MS., written in the seventeenth century by Micheal o Cleirigh. Stokes has indicated the more important readings of the Brussels MS. in his edition. The scribe of the Lismore Text was conscious of the defects of his copy: for in a note appended to the Life of our saint, he says, "It is not I who am responsible for the meaningless words in this _Life_, but the bad manuscript"--_i.e._ the imperfect exemplar of which he was making a transcript.