“Here I may see what it is to give other men’s (goods) with harm.
As will many rich men with unright all day take,
Of poor men here and there, and almisse (alms) sithhe (afterwards) make.”
For the tongs and the stone he accounts by saying that, as he used them for “good ends, each thing should surely find him which he did for God’s love.”
But in the prose version of Wynkyn de Worde, the tongs have been changed into “ox-tongues,” “which I gave some tyme to two preestes to praye for me. I bought them with myne owne money, and therefore they ease me, bycause the fysshes of the sea gnaw on them, and spare me.”
This latter story of the ox-tongues has been followed by Mr. Sebastian Evans, in his poem on St. Brendan. Both he and Mr. Matthew Arnold have rendered the moral of the English version very beautifully.
[274] Copied, surely, from the life of Paul the first hermit.
[283] The famous Cathach, now in the museum of the Royal Irish Academy, was long popularly believed to be the very Psalter in question. As a relic of St. Columba it was carried to battle by the O’Donnels, even as late as 1497, to insure victory for the clan.
[290] Bede, book iii. cap. 3.
[292] These details, and countless stories of St. Cuthbert’s miracles, are to be found in Reginald of Durham, “De Admirandis Beati Cuthberti,” published by the Surtees Society. This curious book is admirably edited by Mr. J. Raine; with an English synopsis at the end, which enables the reader for whom the Latin is too difficult to enjoy those pictures of life under Stephen and Henry II., whether moral, religious, or social, of which the book is a rich museum.
[299] “In this hole lie the bones of the Venerable Bede.”
[303] An English translation of the Anglo-Saxon life has been published by Mr. Godwin, of Cambridge, and is well worth perusal.