As was observed before, towards the close of his life, Dungal retired to the monastery of Bobbio, to which he bequeathed his books. From Bobbio they were transferred to Milan, in A.D. 1606, by Cardinal Frederic Borromeo, and are now in the Ambrosian Library of that city. Among them were three Antiphonaries, one of which seems to have been the famous Bangor Antiphonary. Dungal, no doubt, procured these ancient rituals in order to quote them against Claudius in support of the Catholic doctrine. He appropriately dedicated the work to his countryman St. Columbanus.[312]
Columba, as Lanigan observes, was the real name of Columbanus, the founder of Bobbio, and in all probability, when Dungal calls himself an incola of the saint, he rather means fellow-countryman, than inmate of his monastery.[313]
We cannot stay to criticise the poetry of Dungal. His best poem is an elaborate eulogy on Charlemagne, written in hexameter. Some critics have questioned if Dungal were the author; the style, however, even of the opening lines of the poem, compared with the first lines of the epitaph which he wrote on himself leaves no doubt that the “Irish Exile” was Dungal. The smaller poems that survive, are written in elegiac metre, and display considerable taste, although not much imagination.
There is every reason to think that Dungal, who died about the year A.D. 834, was buried in the crypts of Bobbio. He sleeps well with the friendly saints of Erin; and we earnestly join in his own humble prayer, that he may live for ever with those saints in heaven, even as their dust has long commingled in their far-off graves under the shadows of the Appenines.[314]
IV.—St. Malachy.
We cannot close the history of the School of Bangor without giving a sketch of the life of its greatest abbot, St. Malachy, who may, indeed, be regarded as its second founder. We refer to him here, not because he was a great scholar or a distinguished writer, but rather because the Abbot of Bangor was the great reformer of the Irish Church in the twelfth century—a man pre-eminent for the zeal, energy, and holiness of his apostolic career in the face of the greatest difficulties and dangers. He was, says the Chronicon Scotorum, the man who restored the Monastic and Canonical rules of the Church of Erin; and that sentence is really a summary of his whole life.
St. Malachy—in Irish Maelmeadhog—was born probably in the neighbourhood of Bangor or Armagh in the year A.D. 1095. The family name was O’Morgair, or O’Mongair, which it is said was afterwards changed into O’Dogherty. His father was a lay professor or lecturer in the School of Armagh; but his mother seems to have come from the neighbourhood of Bangor, of which her brother, the uncle of Malachy, was afterwards titular abbot or perhaps airchinnech. The boy was thus fortunate not only in having the advantages of a famous school and a learned father; but also in attaching himself as a personal friend and disciple to the great and holy Imar O’Hagan, who then lived as a recluse in Armagh. It was doubtless under his holy guidance that Malachy acquired that fund of solid virtue which he afterwards exhibited throughout his life.
In consequence of his eminent virtues whilst still very young, Malachy was promoted by Celsus of Armagh to deacon’s orders; and shortly afterwards, before he had attained the then canonical age of thirty, he was ordained a priest by the same great prelate.
Wishing to perfect himself in sacred learning, and especially in the laws and discipline of the Church, St. Malachy next went to the great College of Lismore, which was at this period under the presidency of the venerable Malchus, Bishop of Waterford, and apparently also of Lismore. St. Bernard describes him as then an old man full of days and virtues, and richly endowed with divine wisdom. He was an Irishman by birth, but had been trained in the monastery of Winchester to a more accurate knowledge and observance of ecclesiastical discipline than were to be found at that time in Ireland. Under the influence and direction of this prelate the School of Lismore became, perhaps, the first in Ireland,[315] and St. Malachy fully availed himself of its great advantages.