For St. Patrick’s beautiful hymn, the “Deer’s Cry,” we are indebted to the Book of Hymns of the eleventh century, which, like the Book of Armagh, contains several Patrician pieces. It is a Gaelic composition alleged to have been made by the saint while on his way to the great Court of Tara. It was celebrated for generations before the English conquest as a _lorica_ or prayer for protection. Dr. Todd says, “That this hymn is a composition of great antiquity cannot be questioned. It is written in a very ancient dialect of the Irish Celtic. It was evidently composed during the existence of pagan usages in the country. It makes no allusion to Arianism or any of the heresies prevalent in the Continental Church. It notices no doctrine or practice of the Church that is not known to have existed before the fifth century. In its style and diction, although written in a different language, there is nothing very dissimilar to the Confession and the letter about Coroticus, and nothing absolutely inconsistent with the opinion that it may be by the same author.” Beyond this no positive proof can be given. In the _Liber Hymnorum_ it is prefaced by the following distinctive account in Gaelic:— Patrick made this hymn. In the time of Laoghaire son of Nial it was made. The cause of making it however was to protect himself with his monks against the deadly enemies who were in ambush against the clerics. And this is a corselet of faith for the protection of body and soul against demons and human beings and vices. Every one who shall say it every day with pious meditation on God, demons shall not stay before him. It will be a safeguard to him against every poison and envy; it will be a comna to him against sudden death; it will be a corselet to his soul after dying. Patrick sung this when the ambuscades were sent against him by Laoghaire that he might not go to Tara to sow the faith, so that there seemed before the ambuscaders to be wild deer and a fawn after them, to wit, Benen;[13] and faed fiada (guard’s cry) is its name. Apparently the assassins mistook the chanting of the lorica for the cry of the deer. This saved the party, and furnished a name for the hymn. A very remarkable and striking piece of literature it is, and one that does credit to the language in which it is clothed. “For its glow of imagination and fervour of devotion,” says Dr. Dowden, the author of the _Early Celtic Church in Scotland_, “it will always challenge a high place in the history of Christian hymnology.”