[10] The same story, as Whitley Stokes points out, is told in two ninth-century lives of St. Machut, so that a tenth-century version of Sindbad's first voyage cannot have been the origin of it.
[11] This is evidently the passage upon which Keating's description of hell in the "Three Shafts of Death," Leabh. III. allt. ix., x., xi., is modelled. He quite outdoes his predecessor in declamation and exuberance of alliterative adjectives. Compare also the description in the vision of Adamnan of the infernal regions as it is elaborated in the copy in the Leabhar Breac, in contradistinction to the more sober colouring of the older Leabhar na h-Uidhre.
[12] Beginning:—
"Celebra Juda festa Christi gaudia
Apostulorum exultans memoria.
Claviculari Petri primi pastoris
Piscium rete evangelii corporis
Alleluia."
This hymn, says Dr. Todd, "bears evident marks of the high antiquity claimed for it, and there seem no reasonable grounds for doubting its authenticity."
[13] "The correct system lays down three principles. First, Easter day must be always a Sunday, never on but next after the fourteenth day of the moon; secondly, that fourteenth day of the full moon should be that on or next after the vernal equinox; and thirdly, the equinox itself was invariably assigned to the 21st of March" (Dr. Healy's "Ireland's Schools and Scholars," p. 234). At Rome the 18th had been regarded as the equinox; St. Patrick, however, rightly laid it down that the equinox took place on the 21st.
[14] Late professor of Ecclesiastical History in Dublin University. See "Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy," May, 1892, p. 195.
[15] The first verse runs thus:—