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THE LEGENDS OF SAINT PATRICK BY
AUBREY DE VERE, LL.D.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY.
SAINT PATRICK--FROM "ENGLISH WRITERS," BY HENRY MORLEY.
PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR.
POEMS:-
THE BAPTISM OF SAINT PATRICK.
THE DISBELIEF OF MILCHO.
SAINT PATRICK AT TARA.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE TWO PRINCESSES.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE CHILDREN OF FOCHLUT WOOD.
SAINT PATRICK AND KING LAEGHAIRE.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE IMPOSTOR.
SAINT PATRICK AT CASHEL.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE CHILDLESS MOTHER.
SAINT PATRICK AT THE FEAST OF KNOCK CAE.
SAINT PATRICK AND KING EOCHAID.
SAINT PATRICK AND THE FOUNDING OF ARMAGH CATHEDRAL.
THE ARRAIGNMENT OF SAINT PATRICK.
THE STRIVING OF SAINT PATRICK ON MOUNT CRUACHAN.
EPILOGUE. THE CONFESSION OF SAINT PATRICK.
INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY.
Once more our readers are indebted to a living poet for wide
circulation of a volume of delightful verse. The name of Aubrey de
Vere is the more pleasantly familiar because its association with
our highest literature has descended from father to son. In 1822,
sixty-seven years ago, Sir Aubrey de Vere, of Curragh Chase, by
Adare, in the county of Limerick--then thirty-four years old--first
made his mark with a dramatic poem upon "Julian the Apostate." In
1842 Sir Aubrey published Sonnets, which his friend Wordsworth
described as "the most perfect of our age;" and in the year of his
death he completed a dramatic poem upon "Mary Tudor," published in
the next year, 1847, with the "Lamentation of Ireland, and other
Poems." Sir Aubrey de Vere's "Mary Tudor" should be read by all who
have read Tennyson's play on the same subject.
The gift of genius passed from Sir Aubrey to his third son, Aubrey
Thomas de Vere, who was born in 1814, and through a long life has
put into music only noble thoughts associated with the love of God
and man, and of his native land. His first work, published forty-
seven years ago, was a lyrical piece, in which he gave his sympathy
to devout and persecuted men whose ways of thought were not his own.
Aubrey de Vere's poems have been from time to time revised by
himself, and they were in 1884 finally collected into three volumes,
published by Messrs. Kegan Paul. Left free to choose from among
their various contents, I have taken this little book of "Legends of
St. Patrick," first published in 1872, but in so doing I have
unwillingly left many a piece that would please many a reader.
They are not, however, inaccessible. Of the three volumes of
collected works, each may be had separately, and is complete in
itself. The first contains "The Search after Proserpine, and other
Poems--Classical and Meditative." The second contains the "Legends
of St. Patrick, and Legends of Ireland's Heroic Age," including a
version of the "Tain Bo." The third contains two plays, "Alexander
the Great," "St. Thomas of Canterbury," and other Poems.
For the convenience of some readers, the following extract from the
second volume of my "English Writers," may serve as a prosaic
summary of what is actually known about St. Patrick.
H. M.
ST. PATRICK.
FROM "ENGLISH WRITERS."
The birth of St. Patrick, Apostle and Saint of Ireland, has been
generally placed in the latter half of the fourth century; and he is
said to have died at the age of a hundred and twenty. As he died in
the year 493--and we may admit that he was then a very old man--if
we may say that he reached the age of eighty-eight, we place his
birth in the year 405. We may reasonably believe, therefore, that
he was born in the early part of the fifth century. His birthplace,
now known as Kilpatrick, was at the junction of the Levin with the
Clyde, in what is now the county of Dumbarton. His baptismal name
was Succath. His father was Calphurnius, a deacon, son of Potitus,
who was a priest. His mother's name was Conchessa, whose family may
have belonged to Gaul, and who may thus have been, as it is said she
was, of the kindred of St. Martin of Tours; for there is a tradition
that she was with Calphurnius as a slave before he married her.
Since Eusebius spoke of three bishops from Britain at the Council of
Arles, Succath, known afterwards in missionary life by his name in
religion, Patricius (pater civium), might very reasonably be a
deacon's son.
In his early years Succath was at home by the Clyde, and he speaks
of himself as not having been obedient to the teaching of the
clergy. When he was sixteen years old he, with two of his sisters
and other of his countrymen, was seized by a band of Irish pirates
that made descent on the shore of the Clyde and carried him off to
slavery. His sisters were taken to another part of the island, and
he was sold to Milcho MacCuboin in the north, whom he served for six
or seven years, so learning to speak the language of the country,
while keeping his master's sheep by the Mountain of Slieve Miss.
Thoughts of home and of its Christian life made the youth feel the
heathenism that was about him; his exile seemed to him a punishment
for boyish indifference; and during the years when young enthusiasm
looks out upon life with new sense of a man's power--growing for
man's work that is to do--Succath became filled with religious zeal.
Three Latin pieces are ascribed to St. Patrick: a "Confession,"
which is in the Book of Armagh, and in three other manuscripts;
{10a} a letter to Coroticus, and a few "Dieta Patricii," which are
also in the Book of Armagh. {10b} There is no strong reason for
questioning the authenticity of the "Confession," which is in
unpolished Latin, the writer calling himself "indoctus,
rusticissimus, imperitus," and it is full of a deep religious
feeling. It is concerned rather with the inner than the outer life,
but includes references to the early days of trial by which
Succath's whole heart was turned to God. He says, "After I came
into Ireland I pastured sheep daily, and prayed many times a day.
The love and fear of God, and faith and spirit, wrought in me more
and more, so that in one day I reached to a hundred prayers, and in
the night almost as many, and stayed in the woods and on the
mountains, and was urged to prayer before the dawn, in snow, in
frost, in rain, and took no harm, nor, I think, was there any sloth
in me. And there one night I heard a voice in a dream saying to me,
'Thou hast well fasted; thou shalt go back soon to thine own land;'
and again after a little while, 'Behold! thy ship is ready.'" In
all this there is the passionate longing of an ardent mind for home
and Heaven.
At the age of twenty-two Succath fled from his slavery to a vessel
of which the master first refused and finally consented to take him
on board. He and the sailors were then cast by a storm upon a
desert shore of Britain, possibly upon some region laid waste by
ravages from over sea. Having at last made his way back, by a sea
passage, to his home on the Clyde, Succath was after a time captured
again, but remained captive only for two months, and went back home.
Then the zeal for his Master's service made him feel like the
Seafarer in the Anglo-Saxon poem; and all the traditions of his home
would have accorded with the rise of the resolve to cross the sea,
and to spread Christ's teaching in what had been the land of his
captivity.
There were already centres of Christian work in Ireland, where
devoted men were labouring and drew a few into their fellowship.
Succath aimed at the gathering of all these scattered forces, by a
movement that should carry with it the whole people. He first
prepared himself by giving about four years to study of the
Scriptures at Auxerre, under Germanus, and then went to Rome, under
the conduct of a priest, Segetius, and probably with letters from
Germanus to Pope Celestine. Whether he received his orders from the
Pope seems doubtful; but the evidence is strong that Celestine sent
him on his Irish mission. Succath left Rome, passed through North
Italy and Gaul, till he met on his way two followers of Palladius,
Augustinus and Benedictus, who told him of their master's failure,
and of his death at Fordun. Succath then obtained consecration from
Amathus, a neighbouring bishop, and as Patricius, went straight to
Ireland. He landed near the town of Wicklow, by the estuary of the
River Varty, which had been the landing-place of Palladius. In that
region he was, like Palladius, opposed; but he made some
conversions, and advanced with his work northward that he might
reach the home of his old master, Milcho, and pay him the purchase-
money of his stolen freedom. But Milcho, it is said, burnt himself
and his goods rather than bear the shame of submission to the
growing power of his former slave.
St. Patrick addressed the ruling classes, who could bring with them
their followers, and he joined tact with his zeal; respecting
ancient prejudices, opposing nothing that was not directly hostile
to the spirit of Christianity, and handling skilfully the chiefs
with whom he had to deal. An early convert--Dichu MacTrighim--was a
chief with influential connections, who gave the ground for the
religious house now known as Saul. This chief satisfied so well the
inquiries of Laeghaire, son of Niall, King of Erin, concerning the
stranger's movements, that St. Patrick took ship for the mouth of
the Boyne, and made his way straight to the king himself. The
result of his energy was that he met successfully all the opposition
of those who were concerned in the maintenance of old heathen
worship, and brought King Laeghaire to his side.
Then Laeghaire resolved that the old laws of the country as
established by the judges, whose order was named Brehon, should be
revised, and brought into accord with the new teaching. So the
Brehon laws of Ireland were revised, with St. Patrick's assistance,
and there were no ancient customs broken or altered, except those
that could not be harmonised with Christian teaching. The good
sense of St. Patrick enabled this great work to be done without
offence to the people. The collection of laws thus made by the
chief lawyers of the time, with the assistance of St. Patrick, is
known as the "Senchus Mor," and, says an old poem -
"Laeghaire, Corc Dairi, the brave;
Patrick, Beuen, Cairnech, the just;
Rossa, Dubtach, Fergus, the wise;
These are the nine pillars of the Senchus Mor."
This body of laws, traditions, and treatises on law is found in no
manuscript of a date earlier than the fourteenth century. It
includes, therefore, much that is of later date than the fifth
century.
St. Patrick's greatest energies are said to have been put forth in
Ulster and Leinster. Among the churches or religious communities
founded by him in Ulster was that of Armagh. If he was born about
the year 405, when he was carried to Ireland as a prisoner at the
age of sixteen the date would have been 421. His age would have
been twenty-two when he escaped, after six or seven years of
captivity, and the date 427. A year at home, and four years with
Germanus at Auxerre, would bring him to the age of twenty-seven, and
the year 432, when he began his great endeavour to put Christianity
into the main body of the Irish people. That work filled all the
rest of his life, which was long. If we accept the statement, in
which all the old records agree, that the time of Patrick's labour
in Ireland was not less than sixty years; sixty years bring him to
the age of eighty-eight in the year 493. And in that year he died.
The "Letter to Coroticus," ascribed to St. Patrick, is addressed to
a petty king of Brittany who persecuted Christians, and was meant
for the encouragement of Christian soldiers who served under him.
It may, probably, be regarded as authentic. The mass of legend
woven into the life of the great missionary lies outside this piece
and the "Confession." The "Confession" only expresses heights and
depths of religious feeling haunted by impressions and dreams,
through which, to the fervid nature out of which they sprang heaven
seemed to speak. St. Patrick did not attack heresies among the
Christians; he preached to those who were not Christians the
Christian faith and practice. His great influence was not that of a
writer, but of a speaker. He must have been an orator, profoundly
earnest, who could put his soul into his voice; and, when his words
bred deeds, conquered all difficulties in the way of action with
right feeling and good sense.
HENRY MORLEY.
TO THE MEMORY
OF
WORDSWORTH.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO "THE LEGENDS OF SAINT PATRICK."
The ancient records of Ireland abound in legends respecting the
greatest man and the greatest benefactor that ever trod her soil;
and of these the earlier are at once the more authentic and the
nobler. Not a few have a character of the sublime; many are
pathetic; some have a profound meaning under a strange disguise; but
their predominant character is their brightness and gladsomeness. A
large tract of Irish history is dark: but the time of Saint
Patrick, and the three centuries which succeeded it, were her time
of joy. That chronicle is a song of gratitude and hope, as befits
the story of a nation's conversion to Christianity, and in it the
bird and the brook blend their carols with those of angels and of
men. It was otherwise with the later legends connecting Ossian with
Saint Patrick. A poet once remarked, while studying the frescoes of
Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, that the Sibyls are always
sad, while the Prophets alternated with them are joyous. In the
legends of the Patrician Cycle the chief-loving old Bard is ever
mournful, for his face is turned to the past glories of his country;
while the Saint is always bright, because his eyes are set on to the
glory that has no end.
These legends are to be found chiefly in several very ancient lives
of Saint Patrick, the most valuable of which is the "Tripartite
Life," ascribed by Colgan to the century after the Saint's death,
though it has not escaped later interpolations. The work was long
lost, but two copies of it were re-discovered, one of which has been
recently translated by that eminent Irish scholar, Mr. Hennessy.
Whether regarded from the religious or the philosophic point of
view, few things can be more instructive than the picture which it
delineates of human nature at a period of critical transition, and
the dawning of the Religion of Peace upon a race barbaric, but far
indeed from savage. That wild race regarded it doubtless as a
notable cruelty when the new Faith discouraged an amusement so
popular as battle; but in many respects they were in sympathy with
that Faith. It was one in which the nobler affections, as well as
the passions, retained an unblunted ardour; and where Nature is
strongest and least corrupted it most feels the need of something
higher than itself, its interpreter and its supplement. It prized
the family ties, like the Germans recorded by Tacitus; and it could
not but have been drawn to Christianity, which consecrated them.
Its morals were pure, and it had not lost that simplicity to which
so much of spiritual insight belongs. Admiration and wonder were
among its chief habits; and it would not have been repelled by
Mysteries in what professed to belong to the Infinite. Lawless as
it was, it abounded also in loyalty, generosity, and self-sacrifice;
it was not, therefore, untouched by the records of martyrs, examples
of self-sacrifice, or the doctrine of a great Sacrifice. It loved
children and the poor; and Christianity made the former the
exemplars of faith, and the latter the eminent inheritors of the
Kingdom. On the other hand, all the vices of the race ranged
themselves against the new religion.
In the main the institutions and traditions of Ireland were
favourable to Christianity. She had preserved in a large measure
the patriarchal system of the East. Her clans were families, and
her chiefs were patriarchs who led their households to battle, and
seized or recovered the spoil. To such a people the Christian
Church announced herself as a great family--the family of man. Her
genealogies went up to the first parent, and her rule was parental
rule. The kingdom of Christ was the household of Christ; and its
children in all lands formed the tribes of a larger Israel. Its
laws were living traditions; and for traditions the Irish had ever
retained the Eastern reverence.
In the Druids no formidable enemy was found; it was the Bards who
wielded the predominant social influence. As in Greece, where the
sacerdotal power was small, the Bards were the priests of the
national Imagination, and round them all moral influences had
gathered themselves. They were jealous of their rivals; but those
rivals won them by degrees. Secknall and Fiacc were Christian
Bards, trained by St. Patrick, who is said to have also brought a
bard with him from Italy. The beautiful legend in which the Saint
loosened the tongue of the dumb child was an apt emblem of
Christianity imparting to the Irish race the highest use of its
natural faculties. The Christian clergy turned to account the Irish
traditions, as they had made use of the Pagan temples, purifying
them first. The Christian religion looked with a genuine kindness
on whatever was human, except so far as the stain was on it; and
while it resisted to the face what was unchristian in spirit, it
also, in the Apostolic sense, "made itself all things to all men."
As legislator, Saint Patrick waged no needless war against the
ancient laws of Ireland. He purified them, and he amplified them,
discarding only what was unfit for a nation made Christian. Thus
was produced the great "Book of the Law," or "Senchus Mohr,"
compiled A.D. 439.
The Irish received the Gospel gladly. The great and the learned, in
other nations the last to believe, among them commonly set the
example. With the natural disposition of the race an appropriate
culture had concurred. It was one which at least did not fail to
develop the imagination, the affections, and a great part of the
moral being, and which thus indirectly prepared ardent natures, and
not less the heroic than the tender, to seek their rest in spiritual
things, rather than in material or conventional. That culture,
without removing the barbaric, had blended it with the refined. It
had created among the people an appreciation of the beautiful, the
pathetic, and the pure. The early Irish chronicles, as well as
songs, show how strong among them that sentiment had ever been. The
Borromean Tribute, for so many ages the source of relentless wars,
had been imposed in vengeance for an insult offered to a woman; and
a discourtesy shown to a poet had overthrown an ancient dynasty.
The education of an Ollambh occupied twelve years; and in the third
century, the time of Oiseen and Fionn, the military rules of the
Feine included provisions which the chivalry of later ages might
have been proud of. It was a wild, but not wholly an ungentle time.
An unprovoked affront was regarded as a grave moral offence; and
severe punishments were ordained, not only for detraction, but for a
word, though uttered in jest, which brought a blush on the cheek of
a listener. Yet an injury a hundred years old could meet no
forgiveness, and the life of man was war! It was not that laws were
wanting; a code, minute in its justice, had proportioned a penalty
to every offence, and specified the Eric which was to wipe out the
bloodstain in case the injured party renounced his claim to right
his own wrong. It was not that hearts were hard--there was at least
as much pity for others as for self. It was that anger was
implacable, and that where fear was unknown, the war field was what
among us the hunting field is.
The rapid growth of learning as well as piety in the three centuries
succeeding the conversion of Ireland, prove that the country had not
been till then without a preparation for the gift. It had been the
special skill of Saint Patrick to build the good which was lacked
upon that which existed. Even the material arts of Ireland he had
pressed into the service of the Faith; and Irish craftsmen had
assisted him, not only in the building of his churches, but in
casting his church bells, and in the adornment of his chalices,
crosiers, and ecclesiastical vestments. Once elevated by
Christianity, Ireland's early civilisation was a memorable thing.
It sheltered a high virtue at home, and evangelised a great part of
Northern Europe; and amidst many confusions it held its own till the
true time of barbarism had set in--those two disastrous centuries
when the Danish invasions trod down the sanctuaries, dispersed the
libraries, and laid waste the colleges to which distant kings had
sent their sons.
Perhaps nothing human had so large an influence in the conversion of
the Irish as the personal character of her Apostle. Where others,
as Palladius, had failed, he succeeded. By nature, by grace, and by
providential training, he had been specially fitted for his task.
We can still see plainly even the finer traits of that character,
while the land of his birth is a matter of dispute, and of his early
history we know little, except that he was of noble birth, that he
was carried to Ireland by pirates at the age of sixteen, and that
after five years of bondage he escaped thence, to return A.D. 432,
when about forty-five years old; belonging thus to that great age of
the Church which was made illustrious by the most eminent of its
Fathers, and tasked by the most critical of its trials. In him a
great character had been built on the foundations of a devout
childhood, and of a youth ennobled by adversity. Everywhere we
trace the might and the sweetness which belonged to it, the
versatile mind yet the simple heart, the varying tact yet the fixed
resolve, the large design taking counsel for all, yet the minute
solicitude for each, the fiery zeal yet the genial temper, the skill
in using means yet the reliance on God alone, the readiness in
action with the willingness to wait, the habitual self-possession
yet the outbursts of an inspiration which raised him above himself,
the abiding consciousness of authority--an authority in him, but not
of him--and yet the ever-present humility. Above all, there burned
in him that boundless love, which seems the main constituent of the
Apostolic character. It was love for God; but it was love for man
also, an impassioned love, and a parental compassion. It was not
for the spiritual weal alone of man that he thirsted. Wrong and
injustice to the poor he resented as an injury to God. His vehement
love for the poor is illustrated by his "Epistle to Coroticus,"
reproaching him with his cruelty, as well as by his denunciations of
slavery, which piracy had introduced into parts of Ireland. No
wonder that such a character should have exercised a talismanic
power over the ardent and sensitive race among whom he laboured, a
race "easy to be drawn, but impossible to be driven," and drawn more
by sympathy than even by benefits. That character can only be
understood by one who studies, and in a right spirit, that account
of his life which he bequeathed to us shortly before its close--the
"Confession of Saint Patrick." The last poem in this series
embodies its most characteristic portions, including the visions
which it records.
The "Tripartite Life" thus ends: --"After these great miracles,
therefore, after resuscitating the dead, after healing lepers, and
the blind, and the deaf, and the lame, and all diseases; after
ordaining bishops, and priests, and deacons, and people of all
orders in the Church; after teaching the men of Erin, and after
baptising them; after founding churches and monasteries; after
destroying idols and images and Druidical arts, the hour of death of
Saint Patrick approached. He received the body of Christ from the
Bishop Tassach, according to the counsel of the Angel Victor. He
resigned his spirit afterwards to Heaven, in the one hundred and
twentieth year of his age. His body is still here in the earth,
with honour and reverence. Though great his honour here, greater
honour will be to him in the Day of Judgment, when judgment will be
given on the fruit of his teaching, as of every great Apostle, in
the union of the Apostles and Disciples of Jesus; in the union of
the Nine Orders of Angels, which cannot be surpassed; in the union
of the Divinity and Humanity of the Son of God; in the union, which
is higher than all unions, of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost."
A. DE VERE.
THE LEGENDS OF SAINT PATRICK.
THE BAPTISM OF ST. PATRICK.
"How can the babe baptised be
Where font is none and water none?"
Thus wept the nurse on bended knee,
And swayed the Infant in the sun.
"The blind priest took that Infant's hand:
With that small hand, above the ground
He signed the Cross. At God's command
A fountain rose with brimming bound.
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