206 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
writing would have made this use of the verb vento; but there can be 
no question of the anomalous nature of the expression ad bonum. So 
strange an appearance do these words present in Latin that the Bol- 
landists readily adopted the spurious reading ad benam, conjecturing 
that the river Boyne was intended. The phrase has, however, been 
generally recognized by English translators as meaning ‘“ well” or 
“aright”, and indeed justly so, though the fact does not appear to 
have been noticed that it is the literal Latin equivalent for the words 
50 MMe or co mart, the Irish form of expressing the same idea. 
In the ensuing part of his narrative, after describing the incidents 
of his embarkation, and arrival in some other country, in which he 
appears to have experienced various hardships of travel and of re- 
newed captivity, covering an ill-defined period, the writer finds 
himself again at home with his family among the Britons: ‘ Et 
iterum, post paucos annos, in Brittanis eram cum parentibus meis 
qui me ut filium susciperunt.” The expression i Srittanis means 
‘‘among the Britons”, not ‘in the Brittanias”, as would be signified 
by the form in Brittaniis, which is the reading of the amplified and 
later copies. The distinction, although a delicate one, has strong 
relevancy to the present inquiry ; for 7m Brittaniis ‘‘in the Brittanias”’ 
would possibly, if we may accept the authority of some texts of 
Catullus (carm. xxvii.), be a regular Latin form, though the mss. 
differ so much as greatly to detract from the force of Dr. Lanigan’s 
use of the example (vol. i. p. 118); whereas 7m Brittanis is peculiarly 
the Irish idiom in which a country is designated by the tribe or 
national name of its inhabitants, as in the scholium on the hymn of 
Fiech, where, glossing Fiech’s statement that Patrick was born 7- 
nemthur, that is, in Nemthur or Emthur, the scholiast adds, Cathazr- 
sein feil imbretnaib tuarscirt Acleluide. ‘This same city is in [among | 
the northern Britons, that is, Ailelyde” or Dunbarton (Lib. Hymn. 
fo. 15a). Consequently, the same inference as in the previously 
cited cases would arise here also. 
But whether the phrase be in Brittannis or in Brittaniis, if it were 
used by an Irish writer, there will emerge in connexion with it a 
consideration of some moment as affecting the age of the composition 
itself. If scientific philology have not been led, in its phonetic back- 
reckonings, into premature generalizations, this coupling of the pre- 
position 72 with a dative rather than an accusative is characteristic 
of what is called Middle as distinguished from Old Irish; and the 
presence of such a form of expression here might disincline some 
enlightened minds from the belief that it could have proceeded 
from so early an epoch as the fifth century. Whatever grammatical 
difficulties of this kind may attend the inquiry, they will have to be 
balanced against extraordinary evidences of the genuineness of the 
Confessio, afforded not only by the fact of its early transcription (er. 
a.D. 800) from a book even then in parts illegible from old age, and 
reputed to have been written by Patrick’s own hand, but, in a still 
higher degree, by the flavour of earnestness, truthfulness, and sim- 
