The Ancient Hymn-Charms of Ireland. 425
seems to have been well known in the mediseval period in Ireland. The idea still prevalent in Ireland that the meddling and malicious fairies are the angels who fell with Lucifer, and who were on their way down to hell when our Lord held up his hand, which caused them to remain stationary wherever they happened to be at the time, seems to find an echo in this poem, which says that "the spaces of air are closely crowded with a disordered crew of rebel satellites, held invisible lest man should become infected by their evil examples and their crimes, if there were no wall or screen between him and them." The great age of the composition, and its probable Irish origin, are shown by what the Editors, Drs. Bernard and Atkinson, call its " rude and barbarous though vigorous Latinity," by its use of an old Latin Biblical text as its foundation, and by the employment of those strange and bizarre Latin words found in the Hisperica famina, and peculiar, if not to Ireland alone, to the Celtic districts of S.W. Britain and Ireland. The title of the first stanza, speaking of Columcille as "the latest and noblest of Ireland's prophets," seems also to suggest a date close to Columba's own time, for these titles were added later than the composition of the poem itself.
None of the poems that we have hitherto passed in review, though composed as charms or believed by later reciters to contain definite charm-power, can be said to show any connection in form or style with the Pagan or native charms which they displaced ; they were formed upon another and foreign ecclesiastical model. But we come now to a group which, whether written in Latin or in Irish, show a marked similarity to the native charms common to this day throughout Ireland and the West of Scotland. At the head of this group of native-born charm-poems we may place St. Patrick's Lorica. The word lorica or lurica, the corselet or breastplate, though
