Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/461

 The Ancient Hymn-Charms of Ireland, 419

differing only slightly, exist), ten were written expressly for the protection of the writer from some peril, bodily or spiritual, or are said to confer similar protection on those who recited them. In some cases, no doubt, their use as charms was a later result of the tradition of sacredness attaching to their authorship or age, but in others the authors themselves are believed to have conferred upon them their special charm-power. Just as the small hand- bells of the monks were used not only to call the hours of prayer but to exorcise evil spirits, so the charm-hymn, while nominally it commemorated some dead saint or eulogised a living one, had also the more practical quality of warding off disease or death from those who recited it. These hymns partook of the same character, and in many cases were thrown into the same form, as the pagan charms which they to a certain extent replaced.

The first extant Irish hymn is Sechnall's or Secundinus' Latin hymn in praise of St. Patrick, Audite omnes, a long hymn of which, in a fashion very common in early Ireland and not unknown elsewhere, every quatrain began with a successive letter of the alphabet. In order to get Patrick to listen to his poem, Sechnall is said to have suppressed the first stanza, which conveyed the fact that it was a eulogium on himself, and Patrick expressed himself so well pleased with the hymn that, at the close of its recitation, he offered Sechnall a variety of rewards for its composition, such as that as many sinful souls should go to heaven for the sake of this hymn as there were days in the year or threads in the hood of his cowl. Sechnall contemptuously rejected the terms. " What believer," said he, " would not take with him as many as that to heaven without the trouble of eulogising a man like thee at all .'' " Finally, St. Patrick, who had already promised a full table to everyone who will recite the hymn before dinner and a special pro- tection to every new house in which it is recited on entering, raised his offers to a promise of heaven to everyone who