The “multitudinous city” was, of course, Kildare. It is curious that Oengus should mention Aillinn, and not mention Allen, the supposed seat of Finn, for wherever he had his stronghold must have been, in his epoch, the most important place in Ireland, Tara alone excepted.
Kildare is famous and historic solely on account of St Brigit. Of all Irish Saints, she is the most to be loved. Her charity, her love for humanity, was so absolutely divine, that reading her life as narrated in the Leabhar Breac, we are moved to our very heart’s depths. The miracles she is said to have performed are so wondrous, and show such a love for mankind, especially for the poor, that when we read them we long to be children again in order that we might unhesitatingly believe such beautiful fables. It was in Kildare that that wondrous lamp was which is said to have
“Lived through long ages of darkness and storm,”
without having been replenished by human hand; and it was this legend that inspired Moore to compose the noblest national lyric ever written, “Erin, O Erin.” If he never wrote a line of poetry save what is contained in that song, the Irish people would be justified in raising a statue of gold to his memory. It is, beyond anything of the kind known to humanity,
“Perfect music set to noble words”;
yet, heart-sickening to think of, the masses of the Irish people hardly know it at all!
When St Brigit is contrasted with St Patrick, she appears very different from him. The lives of Ireland’s three great Saints are in the Leabhar Breac, an Irish manuscript compiled early in the fourteenth century; but the greater part of it is made up of transcripts from documents that were probably many hundred years old when they were copied into it. The three Saints whose lives appear in it are Patrick, Brigit, and Columba, or Colum Cill, as he is generally called in Ireland. These lives were translated some years ago by Mr Whitley Stokes, the greatest of living Gaelic scholars; but as only a few dozen copies were printed for private circulation, the book is practically as unknown to the general public as if it never had been printed at all. Extracts from it, therefore, cannot fail to be interesting to the readers of this book.
Brigit shines out a star of the first magnitude, totally eclipsing the lesser two lights, Patrick and Columba. Nothing shall be said about Columba at present, but it has to be admitted that Patrick, as he is represented in the Leabhar Breac, makes a poor show when contrasted with glorious St Brigit. Patrick is represented as spending a large part of his time in cursing and killing, but St Brigit spends most of hers in blessing and relieving. If St Patrick converts a great many, he is represented as killing a great many; but St Brigit kills nobody. The narrative of her life in the Leabhar Breac is probably as wonderful a piece of biography as ever was written. There is no effort at style in it, and no attempt at book-making. The narrative is simplicity in the true sense of the word. One of the wonderful things about it is the side light it throws both on the social and political conditions of ancient Ireland; but, curiously enough, no such light is thrown on the state of the country by the lives of St Patrick and St Columba, written in the same book and probably by the same author.
St Brigit seems to have acted on some of the precepts found in the “Ancient Mariner” fourteen hundred years before the poem was written. She seems to have known that—
“He prayeth best
Who loveth best
All things both great and small,”