The Remains of St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland, the Confessio and Epistle to Coroticus - Translated Into English Blank Verse, With a Dissertation on the Patrician Documents Contained in the "Trias Thaumaturga" And "Book of Armagh," Etc #228043

I have to thank the Council of the Royal Irish Academy for the permission kindly accorded to me to re-publish my husband's last contribution to the Transactions of that learned body, of which he was President at the time of his death.<br><br>The Patrician Documents was the title that Sir Samuel Ferguson gave to these papers; they consisted of his translation into English blank verse, of the Confessio and the Coroticus Epistle, which are admitted by scholars to be authentic writings of St. Patrick himself, and to have come down to us from the fifth century of our era. The Patrician Documents included dissertations upon these, and on the lives published by Colgan in his Trias Thaumaturga, as well as an examination into the collections in the Book of Armagh and elsewhere, not accessible to Colgan, who wrote in the middle of the seventeenth century.<br><br>To the ordinary reader without pretension to scholarship, nor specially interested in the controversies of these early days, the chief attraction of these writings of St. Patrick will be the revelation they afford of the man himself; of his character, motives, and springs of action; of what he aimed at and what achieved. They furnish what may be fairly described as the great missionary Saint's autobiography.