102 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



would like the building to be filled with. Guaiie wished it to be filled with 

 gold and silver, that he might have the wherewith to exercise his geiierositj^ 

 to the poor. Cuimmine wished it to be filled with books, that students might 

 learn therein, and lead men from the way of the devil. Caimin wished it to 

 be filled with diseased persons, afflicted with all kinds of maladies, that on his 

 own body all these afflictions might be concentrated — that he might bear the 

 sufferings of mankind on himself. So Colgan puts it ; the mss. quoted express 

 the wish slightly differently, that the church should be filled unth diseases, 

 not with diseased persons : tliis, on the whole, is a better attested version, 

 and is psychologically consistent with the conception of disease that we have 

 already seen in the Life of Mae Creiehe, where the ejndemic of the Crom- 

 Chonaill was struck by lightning, and reduced to dust and ashes at the prayer 

 of the saint. In any case, the tale affords an interesting illustration of the 

 notion of the transference of disease, familiar to all folklorists; audit adds 

 point to the tradition that I learned on the island, that to the ancient church 

 of St. Michael— which may well have been the actual scene of this strange 

 conversation — persons suffering from mortal disease used to be carried. The 

 story goes on to tell how the three wishes were fulfilled : Guaire got wealth 

 and Cuimmine learning, while Caimin fell into a grievous state of body, so 

 that, among other gruesome details, " his bones hardly held together.'' 



Of the literary labours of Caimin, Colgan mentions a commentary on the 

 Psalms, of which he had himself seen a fragment in the Monastery of Donegal, 

 relating to the 119th Psalm. This fragment is now preserved in the library 

 of the Franciscan Monastery, Merchants' Quay, Dublin, and has recently been 

 made the subject of a study by Mi\ Esposito.' It hardly needed Mr. Esposito's 

 trenchant criticisms to show that this MS. could not possibly be so old as 

 St. Caimin's time, or anything near thereto. It is dated by Bruun, with 

 whom Mr. Esposito agrees, about 1100 a. d. There is, however, nothing 

 against the possibility that the psalter— for it is a psalter, with interlined 

 glosses, not a commentary — was actually written on Inis Cealtra, possibly 

 copied from earlier Jiss. there preserved, which earlier .mss. were traditionally, 

 though not necessarily truthfully, ascribed to St. Caimin.^ The colophon of 

 the Durrow Go.spels affords a well-known analogy. In O'Looney's letter, 

 quoted at the beginning of this paper, he ihus refers to the MS. : " Who has 

 not heard of the learned p.salter [sic] of St. Caimin, and the celebrated book of 



^ Proceedings R.I. A., xxxii, sect. C, p. 78. 



- The note written by (J'Clery on the MS. (see Mr. Esposito '.s paper, loc. cit., p. 79) is 

 definite and apparently satisfactory evidence that the book, or the fragment, was obtained 

 from member.s of the t'lann Bniaidedha, residents ou or near the island, at the beginning 

 of the seventeenth century. 



