Dr Cameron, who has a learned article on “St. Patrick’s Hymn” in The Scottish Celtic Review, and to whose accurate prose translation as well as to Dr Stokes’s in his Goidelica. I am so much indebted in the above rendering, makes the following remark:—“This hymn forms one of the Irish hymns in the ‘Liber Hymnorum,’ a MS. belonging to Trinity College, Dublin, and written, as Dr Stokes conjectures, about the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century. The hymn itself, however, belongs to a much earlier date.”
The chief dates in the life of Patrick, who was probably born about 387, are his landing in Ireland in 432 when he is represented as attending the assembly of the Irish Kings and Chieftains which was held on the hill of Tara that year; his celebrated letter against Coroticus in 453 to regulate church discipline; and his death which occurred in 493.
A very remarkable incident, related in the “Book of Armagh” and quoted in Todd’s “Life of Patrick,” which bears internal evidence of high antiquity, and now evidently written at a time when paganism was not yet extinct in the country, illustrates the way in which Patrick set before the Celtic mind the faith which he proclaimed. One morning he and his attendants repaired to a fountain called Clebach at Cruachan, now Rath-croghan, an ancient residence of the kings of Connaught. Thither came the two daughters of King Laogharie, and on seeing the strangers supposed them to be Duine Sidhe fairies, “men of the hills,” and said to them, “Who are ye?” And Patrick said unto them, “It were better for you to confess to our true God, than to inquire concerning our race.”
‘The first Virgin said,—
“Who is God?
“And where is God?
“And of what nature is God?
“And where is his dwelling place?
“Has your God sons and daughters, gold and silver?
“Is He everliving?