Finally the aged record, after well-nigh 1200 years’ vicissitudes, was published by Dr. Reeves, Bishop of Down, in 1856, and his work republished in 1874 by the publishers of the Series of Scottish Historians, this time with English translation and re-arrangement of the Notes, which Dr. Reeves permitted in order to adapt the book to a wider circle of readers. A truly romantic history, taking it all in all, is this story of the ancient wanderer which has come to honour in a foreign land, but has not yet found a way home to its native soil. What would Schaffhausen take and part with it? Scotland has never asked. Some day she may, when she awakens to the fact that the very oldest and, at the same time, one of the most intensely interesting monuments of her literary history is an alien in a strange country. Apart from the book itself, the hero of the book, and its faithful copyist, there is a fascination and much insight to be drawn from a study of the personality of its author. Adamnan, like Boswell, has achieved immortality through an enthusiastic and almost self-effacing hero-worship. His great object, as he tells us again and again, is to show up the wonderful character of the saintly Columba, and any deed or tale that he thinks will enhance the prestige of this “great father and founder of monasteries” goes down with unfailing devotion. Born about the year 624 in Donegal, Adamnan, like Cummene, was a kinsman of St. Columba. Indeed, the three men were descended from three brothers, all of royal lineage. His peculiar name is understood to be a diminutive of Adam, and is frequently followed by the patronymic Ua Tinne, meaning grandson of Tinne. Of his father Ronan, or his mother Ronnat, we know absolutely nothing beyond their descent, which was of high degree. And of his own childhood and youth there remains only a single legend, supposed to be the creation of a later age, reporting his first meeting with Finnachta, afterwards monarch of Ireland, with whom Adamnan was on the most friendly terms. This Finnachta, as his biographer relates, was riding along one day to his sister’s house with a numerous cavalcade, when he met a schoolboy with a jar of milk on his back. In his haste to get out of the way the stripling knocked his foot against a stone, and tripping, down went the jar with its contents upon the ground. Whereupon the great prince spoke kindly to the boy and assured him of protection, bidding him not to sorrow over it. To whom the latter replied, “O good man, I have cause for grief, for there are three goodly students in one house and three more of us are attendants upon them. And how we act is this: one attendant from among us goes out in turn to collect sustenance for the other five, and it was my turn to-day; but what I had gathered for them has been spilled upon the ground, and what grieves me more, the borrowed jar is broken and I have not wherewith to pay for it.”