16 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
The older Bodleian text (Fell. 1) gives no assistance in the way 
either of punctuation, distinguishing capitals, or of discriminatory 
spacing ; but instead of ‘‘itaque’”’ it has ‘‘igitur,”’ the equivalent of 
‘“‘itaque”’ in its initiatory force, and affords, though after a great 
lapse of time, what partakes of the character of cotemporanea expositio, 
in aid of the division after ‘‘ deveneram.”’ 
The later Bodleian MSS. (Fell. 3) offer the assistance of a semi- 
comma, and go to support the foregoing conclusions, by placing it 
after ‘‘ deveneram.” 
Taking the division there, and giving “‘itaque” its proper force, 
the second sentence would read:—‘‘[As] daily, however, I fed my 
flocks, and often in the day prayed, the fear of God,” &c. But the 
acceptance of this solution of the first difficulty necessitates the giving 
a different meaning to ‘‘sed”’ in the antecedent matter. ‘‘Sed” is 
used in Latin only in its adversative sense. It never, so far as I 
know, has the meaning of preter or nist. In our own language, 
however, its equivalent ‘“‘but’’ has a wider use. It signifies also 
‘except,’ uniting the forces of the Latin ‘“‘sed” and ‘‘nisi” and 
“preter.” An opinion exists that the English “but,” in each of 
these meanings, is a separate word and of independent origin. We 
have, however, an example of the same forces co-existing in the Irish 
acht, which regularly means ‘“‘ but’ adversatively, as well as ‘‘save,”’ 
“unless,” or ‘‘ except.” No one has thought of providing two roots 
for acht, as has been done, or supposed to be done, for the English 
‘“but,’? and acht may be taken for the purposes of this inquiry, apart 
from any question of etymology, as a Celtic particle, in translating 
which into Latin, in the case of one not well skilled in the latter 
language, the word ‘‘sed’’ would probably suggest itself as a full 
equivalent to it in either of its meanings. Treating the text on this 
hypothesis, and remembering the writer’s apology for the rudeness of 
his endeavours to express his native speech in an alien tongue— 
‘‘nam lingua et loquela nostra translata est in linguam alienam, sicut 
facile potest probari ex alive [ex saliva] scripturse mee ”’—we find a 
rendering of the first sentence of the paragraph equally self-contained 
and apposite with that for which it is submitted as a substitute, 
while we leave the general meaning of the passage at large substan- 
tially unaltered, and the second sentence freed from all difficulty oc- 
casioned by its troublesome ‘‘ itaque,”’ viz. :—‘‘ Neither was I worthy 
nor such a one as that . . . the Lord should bestow upon me such a 
grace as I, at one time in my youth, never hoped for or thought ot, 
except after I had come into Ireland. Daily, however, [as] I fed my 
flocks, and often in the day, prayed, the fear of God did more and 
more come near to me,” &c. 
If this be so, we have grounds for surmising that at least one vo- 
cable of the native speech, out of which St. Patrick constructed those 
Latin sentences, belonged to some Celtic dialect not unlikely to be 
found among the Britons of Strathclyde, and for other traces of which 
we shall not be altogether unrewarded in a further examination of the 
‘« Confessio.”’ 
