Page:The most ancient lives of Saint Patrick - O'Leary.djvu/13

Rh the book I have made out from the work by the Bollandists, which seems to have been prepared with scholarly and judicious diligence.

Of the illustrations, it is to be stated that the one prefixed to the life of St. Fiech has been an heirloom in the family of Counsellor Sheehan, of this city, and is taken from an old Irish prayer-book, supposed to be between three and five hundred years old. The frontispiece and the illustration fronting the Tripartite Life are taken from the Spicelegium, were engraved by Messengham, with the approbation of the French King and the Paris Archbishop, at Paris, in 1629, and were reproduced at Dublin in 1809. They are now re-engraved for the first time in this country. The illustration prefixed to the life by Jocelin is of ancient date, and supposed to have been suggested by the representation of St. Patrick in the Kilkenny Cathedral.

I hold myself responsible in no way whatsoever for the statements of St. Fiech, St. MacEvin, or Jocelin, but I present to the reader what they asserted they had received from antiquity. Their narratives may be pronounced fables, or legends, or inventions, or superstitions, or histories. On their intrinsic merits I am silent, except inasmuch as they breathe a firm belief in the omnipresence of God amongst men, strangely at variance with the lifeless, frosty indifference of our own day, and are, in addition, savored with a holy heat of charity and a high moral tone. Without comment, then, from