The first of these productions is the last of the great _Imrama_, and by far the most famous, though not the best from a literary point of view.[187] Not only did the legend of St. Brendan, of Clonfert, surnamed the Voyager (483-574), become one of the most widely diffused and most popular tales of the Middle Ages, but it even influenced, in some slight degree, the course of the world’s history, for its account of a land beyond the Atlantic fired the imagination, and directed the course, of Spanish and Portuguese navigators many centuries after its own date.[188] At one period of his labours, St. Brendan appears to have been seized with that _taedium vitae_ which is apt, at times, to weigh with special force upon diligent workers for righteousness. In his case it asserted itself, characteristically, in that impulse which even now urges so many of his countrymen to follow his course across the Atlantic, but on a voyage whence there is no return, and to another world which seldom affords a vision of Paradise, at any rate. In this frame of mind he prayed for a land, ‘secret, hidden, secure, delightful, apart from men’; he then fell asleep, and, in a dream, was directed to repair to Sliabh Daidche (now Brandon Hill, in the Co. Kerry). This he did, and there met an angel, who bade him build three ships, and commit himself to the ocean. The building and manning of the ships, and the early stages of the voyage, wherein the old model of the _Imrama_ is closely followed, are interesting, but cannot be given here. One day the voyagers landed upon the back of a sleeping whale, taking it for an island, until the monster, awaking, bore them off across the sea.[189] Thus they journeyed for five years, being sustained the while by food miraculously sent to them, as to the island hermits of the earlier _Imrama_. At length St. Brendan espied the Devil approaching them across the waves.[190] He hailed the demon, and questioned him, who replied that he had come to seek his punishment ‘in the deep closes of the black, dark sea.’ This roused the Saint’s curiosity, but the Devil told him that none might see those things and live; he was prevailed on, however, to guide the Saint to the gate of Hell. Here Brendan saw ‘a rough, hot prison, full of stench and filth and flame,’ and ‘the camps of poisonous demons’; here were wailing and ‘handsmiting of the sinful folk;[191] and a gloomy, mournful life in cores of pain, in prisons of fire, in streams of the rows of eternal fire, in the cup of eternal sorrow and death’ (tr. W. S.). The land was full of black swamps, surrounding fiery forts, and fiery mountains, over which demons were dragging the souls of the lost, without respite. Then follow long and gruesome descriptions of the sufferings endured in that place; these are of the usual type, including all the horrors of a wild and desolate region, with inclement weather, combining the extremes of heat and cold; foul, poisonous lakes; fierce winds; wild, rough brakes, and