ascribed to him in the "Chronicon Scotorum;" and there is a collection of fifteen

poems attributed to him in the O'Clery MSS. at Brussels, and nearly a hundred
moremostly evident forgeriesin the Bodleian at Oxford. [24] He does not seem to
have ever written any work in prose.
There are six lives of Columcille still extant, the greatest of them all being that in
Latin by Adamnan,[25] who was one of his successors in the abbacy of Iona, and who
was born only twenty-seven years after Columcille's death. This admirable work,
written in flowing and very fair Latin, was derived, as Adamnan himself tells us,
partly from oral and partly from written sources. A memoir of Columcille had
already been written by Cuimine Finn or Cummeneus Albus, [26] as Adamnan calls
him, the last Abbot of Iona but one before himself, and that memoir he almost
entirely embodied in his third book. He had also some other written accounts before
him, and the Irish poems, both of the saint himself and of other bards, amongst
them Baithine Mr, who had enjoyed his personal friendship, and St. Mura, who
was a little his juniorpoems [Pg 183] now lost. He had also constant opportunities
of conversing with those who had seen the great saint and had been familiar with
him in life, and he was writing on the spot and amidst the associations and
surroundings wherein his last thirty years had been spent, and which were
inseparably connected with his memory. The result was that he produced a work,
which although not ostensibly a history, and dealing only with the life of a single
man, and that rather from the transcendental than from the practical side, is
nevertheless of the utmost value to the historian on acc