Lawlor — The Cathach of St. Columha. 325 



Aclamnan may lead us to suppose that even if he had been given the 

 opportunity St. Columha would not unwillingly have omitted this part of 

 his task, for when Baithen had written a Psalter and desired to have 

 it corrected by one of the brethren, his master would not allow such 

 unnecessary trouble to be taken.' But, however that may be, the con- 

 siderable number of mistakes in the manuscript, to,2;ether with the quickness 

 with which many of them were detected and set right, suggests that it was 

 written by an accurate scribe who worked with more speed than his wont.- 



But again, in our discussion of O'Donnell's story of the writing of the 

 Cathach, it was suggested that St. Finnian's book was probably a copy of a 

 portion of St. Jerome's Latin Bible, rather than of the Old Latin version 

 then in use in Ireland ; and attention was called to the fact that the Book 

 of DuiTOW, the exemplar of which was apparently written in like circum- 

 stances by the same scribe, St. Columha himself, exhibits a Vulgate text 

 with singularly little pre-Hieronymian taint.^ But I have also shown that 

 the manuscript now known as the Cathach is a copy of St. Jerome's second 

 recension of the Psalter — the Galilean — and that its freedom from mixcure is 

 almost as conspicuous as that of the Durrow text.* In other words, it is 

 exactly the sort of text we might have expected it to be if it was indeed 

 copied from St. Pinnian's book. When we recall that St. Columba, or any 

 other scribe of his day, must have known his Latin Psalter by heart, we shall 

 see that, working against time on the new version, he would readily revert 

 now and then to the phrases of the more familiar text. Such accidental 

 mixture would be more likely to occur in the Psalms than even in the 

 Gospels, for constant recitation of the " three fifties " must have made the 

 actual words of the Psalter more familiar than those of any other part of 

 the Bible. Thus some of the Old Latin renderings in our manuscript may 

 have been unconsciously contributed by the scribe. His exemplar may 

 have been at least as free from them as the exemplar of the Durrow 

 Gospels. 



Xhe exemplar of the Cathach, as we have seen,^ was more or less fully 

 provided with the Hieronymian asterisks and obeli. This, perhaps, helps 

 us to explain a gloss on the Amra Colum Cille. The words " He secured 

 correctness of psalms " are explained thus : " i.e. he corrected the psalms by 



' Adamnan, i, 23. "Cur banc super nos infers sine causa molestiam 1 nam in tuo hoc 



do quo dicis psalterio nee una superflua reperietur litera nee alia deesse, excepta I uocali 

 quae sola deest. " Of course Adamnan does not interpret the tale as I have done. 



"- Above, p. 250. 



3 Above, pp. 314 f., 320 f. 



* Above, pp. 256, 258 ff. 



'' Above, p. 256 ff. 



