e afterwards, as is well
known, the councillor and confidant of Charlemagne. The application to
the Bass of the lines in which he describes the anchoret residence of
St. Balther is evident:

Est locus undoso circumdatus undique ponto,
Rupibus horrendis praerupto et margine septus,
In quo belli potens terreno in corpore miles
Saepius aerias vincebat Balthere turmas; etc.

The Bass was not the only hermit's island on our eastern coasts which
was imagined, in these credulous times, to be the occasional abode of
evil spirits. According to Bede no one had dared to dwell alone on the
island of Farne before St. Cuthbert selected it as his anchoret
habitation, because demons resided there (propter demorantium ibi
phantasias demonum). _Vita Cuthberti_, cap. 16. See also the undevilling
of the cave of Dysart by St. Serf in the footnote of page 125, _supra_;
and some alleged feats of St. Patrick and St. Columba in this direction
in Dr. O'Donovan's _Annals of the Four Masters_, vol. i. p. 156. Two
other islands in the Firth of Forth are noted in ancient ecclesiastical
history--viz., Inch May and Inch Keith. "The ile of May, decorit (to use
the words of Bellenden) with the blude and martirdome of Sanct Adriane
and his fallowis," was the residence of that Hungarian missionary and
his disciples when they were attacked and murdered about the year 874 by
the Danes (Bellenden's _Translation of Boece's History_, vol. i. p. 37);
see also vol. ii. p. 206; Dempster's _Historia Eccl. Gentis Scotorum_,
lib. i. 17, and vol. i. p. 20; and Fordun, in the _Scotichronicon_, lib.
i. c. vi., where he describes "Maya, prioratus cujus est cella
canonicorum Sancti Andreae de Raymonth; ubi requiescit Sanctus Adrianus,
cum centum sociis suis sanctis martyribus." Inch Keith is enumerated by
Dr. Reeves (_Preface to Life of Columba_, p. 66) as one of the Scotch
churches of St. Adamnan, Abbot of Iona from A.D. 679 to 704, and the
biographer of St. Columba[119]--Fordun having long ago described it as a
place "in qua praefuit Sanctus Adamnanus abbas, qui honorifice suscepit
Sanctum Servanum, cum sociis suis, in ipsa insula, ad primum suum
adventum in Scotiam." Andrew Wynton, himself the Prior of St. Serf's
Isle in Lochlevin, describes also, in his old metrical _Orygynale
Chronykil of Scotland_, vol. i. p. 128, this apocryphal meeting of the
two saints

"at Inchkeith,
The ile betweene Kingorne and Leth."

_The Breviary of