442 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 
misnomer to call the contents of this ms. a life. It is rather a list of 
the lands, privileges, honours, and rights of sanctuary attaching to 
Penagh, with an occasional allusion to St. Caillin. 
The MS. which I have the pleasure of suhmitting to the Academy 
for inspection to-day would seem to be a copy of a more ancient Life, 
which the scribe who wrote the copy calls "the Old Eook of Eenagh," 
and he says "there was only poetry in it." Unfortunately it is im- 
perfect. The last folio is marked 48, and that it never had more we 
learn from a note at the end of folio 48 J by the scribe : 
" Finit of all we have found of the Old Book of CaiUin." 
It has at present only 41. The only other ancient copy now in exist- 
ence, so far as we know, that of the British Museum, is also imperfect ; 
and though one supplements the other to a certain extent, yet the full 
text cannot be had even from both jointly. Which of the two is the 
more ancient, can be determined with certainty only by the inspection 
of both. The editor of the Life of St. Caillin thinks the British Mu- 
seum copy only a transcript of this. Mr. Hennessy thinks it two 
centuries at least older. 
The Life says "it was Tadhg that caused Maurice O'Mulchonry to 
put this book in a narrative form through the extent of his learning 
and through the excess of his devotion to Caillin." This was Tadhg 
O'Roddy, who came of a family that were hereditary comarbs of the 
church and monastery of Fenagh. He lived in the beginning of the 
sixteenth century, and was abbot of Fenagh. The precise date of the 
MS. is 1516. The Life says of him that " he was a man of wisdom and 
knowledge, of learning and jurisprudence, a reader of the Scotic, a 
man who composes Seghda and oglachas, and who observes the pri- 
vileges and prohibitions of the place in which he is, to wit, that he 
should keep a house of general hospitality and not deny the face of a 
man, but be like an immovable rock in humanity for ever" — just 
such a man, I should think, as would make a scribe undertake and 
complete with a good will any task that would be set to him. 
I may add that this Life has been published with a translation by 
the late Mr. D. H. Kelly, copiously annotated by Mr. Hennessy. 
Mr. Kelly seems to have spared no expense in its preparation for the 
press and in all that regards the printing. Would that others who 
can do so imitated his example, and by so doing rendered accessible to 
students of Irish, both at home and abroad, some of the vast treasures 
which are stored in this library and elsewhere, and of necessity out of 
