heroic courage, faced every danger in order to accomplish his purpose. Even before the Annals of the Four Masters were begun, he tells us himself that he spent ten long years travelling through all parts of the country, in order to collect his materials. He visited nearly all the religious houses then in existence he called upon nearly all the Catholic prelates in Ireland at the time, from whom he got valuable assistance and encouragement he was a welcome and an honoured guest in the great houses of the old Catholic gentry of Ireland, both Celtic and Norman he visited the great historical schools kept by the professional ollaves, and, being himself one of the craft, he was heartily welcomed in them all. These long journeys he accomplished, so far as we can judge, all on foot, trudging from convent to convent, and from house to house, laden with his old books and manuscripts, which we must assume he carried in his wallet. He had no money to buy books, but he got the loan of many of them several to be afterwards copied at his leisure he had to copy on the spot, because the owners would not part with them; for in most cases, as he himself tells us, he had no other resource, seeing that he could neither buy, nor beg, nor borrow the precious treasure. "Before I came to you," he says, "O noble Ferrall O’Gara, I spent ten years in transcribing every old material I found concerning the saints of Ireland;" and also, as we know from the introductions prefixed to his work, in compiling certain preparatory treatises before engaging in his last and greatest work, the compilation of the Annals of Erin, both sacred and profane.
In this preparatory labour he was also careful to secure the co-operation of the greatest scholars of his own time, and especially of the official antiquarians, who were afterwards associated with him in compiling the Annals. How unceasingly he laboured during those years we may infer from what we know he accomplished in the two years, from 1630 to 1632, when he began the Annals. The first-fruit of these labours was the work now known as the Martyrology of Donegal, which in its present form was completed in the Convent of Donegal, by Brother Michael, in 1630. In the same year was completed the Succession of the Kings of Erin and the Genealogies of the Saints, a work which was begun at Lismoyny, in Westmeath, and completed in the Convent of Athlone in November, 1630. Next year, Brother Michael and his associates met at the Franciscan Convent of
