The date or period at which the Lives (Latin and Irish) were written is manifestly, for half a dozen good reasons, a question of the utmost importance to the student of the subject.  Alas, that the question has to some extent successfully defied quite satisfactory solution.  We can, so far, only conjecture—­though the probabilities seem strong and the grounds solid.  The probabilities are that the Latin Lives date as a rule from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when they were put into something like their present form for reading (perhaps in the refectory) in the great religious houses.  They were copied and re-copied during the succeeding centuries and the scribes according to their knowledge, devotion or caprice made various additions, subtractions and occasional multiplications.  The Irish Lives are almost certainly of a somewhat earlier date than the Latin and are based partly (i.e. as regards the bulk of the miracles) on local tradition, and partly (i.e. as regards the purely historical element) on the authority of written materials.  They too were, no doubt, copied and interpolated much as were the Latin Lives.  The present copies of Irish Lives date as a rule from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only, and the fact that the Latin and the Irish Life (where there is this double biography) sometimes agree very perfectly may indicate that the Latin translation or Life is very late.

The chief published collections of Irish Saints’ Lives may be set down as seven, scil.:—­five in Latin and one each in Irish and English.  The Latin collections are the Bollandists’, Colgan’s, Messingham’s, Fleming’s, and Plummer’s; the Irish collection is Stokes’ ("Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore”) and the English is of course O’Hanlon’s.

Most striking, probably, of the characteristics of the “Lives” is their very evident effort to exalt and glorify the saint at any cost.  With this end of glorification in view the hagiographer is prepared to swallow everything and record anything.  He has, in fact, no critical sense and possibly he would regard possession of such a sense as rather an evil thing and use of it as irreverent.  He does not, as a consequence, succeed in presenting us with a very life-like or convincing portrait of either the man or the saint.  Indeed the saint, as drawn in the Lives, is, as already hinted, a very unsaintlike individual—­almost as ready to curse as to pray and certainly very much more likely to smite the aggressor than to present to him the other cheek.  In the text we shall see St. Mochuda, whose Life is a specially sane piece of work, cursing on the same occasion, first, King Blathmac and the Prince of Cluain, then, the rich man Cronan who sympathised with the eviction, next an individual named Dubhsulach who winked insolently at him, and finally the people of St. Columba’s holy city of Durrow who had stirred up hostile feeling against him.  Even gentle female saints can hurl an imprecation too.  St. Laisrech, for instance, condemned the lands of those who refused her tribute, to—­nettles, elder shrub, and corncrakes!  It is pretty plain that the compilers of the lives had some prerogatives, claims or rights to uphold—­hence this frequent insistence on the evil of resisting the Saint and presumably his successors.