Chapter 32 would provide the work with a symmetrical conclusion. As in the exordium the author represents Adamnán as the last in a series of holy men to whom analogous revelations had been vouchsafed, so in this peroration he declares the identity of the doctrine preached by Adamnán, respecting the world to come, with the teaching of other saints and fathers of the Church. In designing his work with this structural completeness, the author stands alone, so far as I am aware, until Dante comes on the scene. The episode of Enoch and Elijah standing under the Tree of Life, surrounded by the bird-flocks, though well told, adds nothing to the form in which it appears in other Irish legends of the period. We have already given reasons for supposing that it is an excrescence upon the original design. The reflections there made upon the sorrow experienced by the righteous on hearing of the sorrows of Doomsday,[185] remind us of a similar passage in Dante: ‘Se di là sempre ben per noi si dice, Di quà che dire e far per lor si puote, Da quei, ch’hanno al voler buona radice?’ _Purg._ xi. 31-33. The rhapsodical description of Heaven, which concludes the work as it now stands, is likewise a matter of ‘common form.’ It may possibly be an amplification of several passages in the Revelation (_e.g._ xxi. 4, etc.), though we have seen that something of the kind existed, in a rudimentary form, in some of the _Echtra_, when describing the Sidhe of a Dé Danann chief. The curiously close parallel in the Avesta has been noted already. This chapter, as before mentioned, does not form part of the version preserved in the Lebor Brec, and although that MS. is by far the more recent, it is quite possible that the scribe followed a version transcribed before the addition was made.[186] 6. LATER DEVELOPMENTS The _Fis Adamnáin_ represents the culminating point to which the Vision of the Otherworld was brought by writers of the Irish school: henceforth the achievements of that school are principally apparent in the influence which they exercised upon the course which the legend took upon the Continent, and thus, indirectly, upon the development of European literature. Enough has been said in an earlier part of this work to show that abundant means existed for familiarising Continental students with any branch of letters to which the Irish schools might be addicted, and accordingly we now find the Irish legend of the Otherworld disseminating itself through the medium as well of works written upon Irish soil, as of the writings of Irish scholars in Continental foundations, and similar works composed by foreign authors more or less under Irish influences.