Page:Writings of Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland.djvu/18

Rh by competent scholars. These are to be found in Patrick's Opuscula, edited by Ware and Villanueva. No scholar, however, who has read even a few lines of the tract De Tribus Habitaculis, Of the Three Habitations (or the World, Heaven, and Hell), could believe St. Patrick to have been its author, so different in all respects is its Latin style from that exhibited in the genuine Confessio and Coroticus. The same may be said of the tract De abusionibus Seculi, and of others. Some, if not all, of the Canons attributed to Patrick are decidedly productions of a later age. None of them, in the form in which they have come down to us, are earlier than the eighth century. See Dr. Todd's St. Patrick, pp. 485 ff., and Dr. W. Stokes in the Tripartite Life, as also the article by Professor G. T. Stokes, in Smith and Wace's Dict. of Christian Biography.

St. Patrick's Irish Hymn is of great antiquity, although, as Dr. Todd says, 'it may be difficult, if not impossible, to adduce proof in support of the tradition that Patrick was its author.' The Irish hymn is distinctly mentioned in Tirechán's Collectons, that is, in the middle of the seventh century. It is a composition of