The others, which he had not seen, are variously distributed in Austria, Bavaria, Switzerland, and Belgium. With all its defects, Adamnan’s masterpiece is the most valuable monument of the early Celtic Church which has escaped the ravages of time; imaginative, superstitious, magical, and steeped in hero-worship, it is characteristically Celtic and of surpassing interest to the archæologist and philologist. Its value as such would have been vastly enhanced in these times had it been written in Gaelic, and doubtless, too, had the author condescended more on social and historical details. But Adamnan apparently had no high opinion of his native language as a literary medium. In his first preface he almost apologises for using Gaelic names of men and tribes and obscure places in the “base Scotic tongue,” which he thinks rude in comparison with the languages of foreign nations, and begs his readers not to despise a record of useful deeds on account of these native words inserted. Dr. Reeves seems to regret that Adamnan did not follow the method of Bede and give us an ecclesiastical history instead of a biography. We cannot all share his sentiment. Had it been other than it is—had it even been in Gaelic—the probability is that it might not have survived. In Gaelic it certainly never could have attained the celebrity it enjoyed on the continent of Europe during the Middle Ages, and which helped to perpetuate it. On the other hand, without the memoir as thus preserved, the life of St. Columba, the greatest pioneer of Scottish history, religion, and literature, would now be as vague and jumbled as that of any mythical hero, even as that of the historical St Patrick outside his own “Confession” unfortunately is; and we should be ignorant of many points concerning which we have now first-hand information. As it stands, the _Vita Columbæ_ is still the most authentic voucher we have for various important particulars in the civil and religious history of the Picts and Scots, and the severe Pinkerton himself was perhaps never nearer the truth on Celtic subjects than when he pronounced it “the most complete piece of such biography that all Europe can boast of, not only at so early a period, but even through the whole Middle Ages.” CHAPTER V THE BOOK OF DEER