or Icolmkill, a small island of the Hebrides, memorable in our annals for its connection with the early Christian church in Britain, and as having been for centuries a seat of learning and civilization—the "Instructress of the West"—as well as the chosen and venerated place of sepulture of the kings of Scotland, and the native chiefs and lords of the Isles. Thus consecrated by historical associations and devotional feeling, and possessing remains of great antiquity, the little low "Island of the Waves," or "Blessed Island," as its name has been interpreted, is invested with a strong and imperishable interest, and is the resort of pilgrims of all classes and countries—poets, painters, moralists, and devotees. Its appearance from the sea, when the visitor has emerged from the shadow of the dark massive rocks of Mull, or has surveyed the wondrous temple of Staffa, is at first calculated to produce a feeling of disappointment. It presents no outline of precipitous cliffs or fertile shores. The surface is varied by irregular ridges of hills, rising up from the beach, with patches of green pasture, some corn-fields, and a range of cottages—the modern village—fronting the sea, over which is seen the high square tower of the ruined cathedral, from which in former ages a famous peal of bells summoned the islanders to prayer, and was heard far over these solitary and barren shores. The hills in general do not exceed 100 feet in height, but the most elevated of the group, called Dun-ii, rises 330 feet above the level of the sea. The whole extent of the island is but three miles in length by one in breadth; its population, according to the census of 1851, was just 604 souls, consisting ofcrofters, or small tenants, with their families, who unite the pursuit of fishing with the cultivation of the land, and the rearing of black cattle; and the proprietor, the Duke of Argyll, derives from the entire island a revenue of only about £300 per annum. The riches of Iona, therefore, consist of its past glory and ancient renown. Its treasures are its monastic ruins, sculptured tombs and crosses, the memory of its first great canonized missionary, and the enthusiasm which hallowed the spot, "once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefit of knowledge and the blessings of religion."

Iona has been known under many names, and has afforded scope for the ingenuity of etymologists. In writings and charters it bears no less than thirty different denominations or forms of orthography. Adomnan (circa A.D. 680) writes it Hyona, supposed by some to be the Latinized form of I-thon, the Celtic "Island of Waves," or Ishona, Isle of the Blessed; while Keith and Pennant derive it from the Hebrew Touah, a pigeon, presumed to be an allusion to the name of Columba. Bede refers to it as Hy or Hit (sometimes commuted into the single letter Y), signifying in Irish "the island," thus pre-eminently distinguishing Iona among the Hebridean archipelago of islands. It is still called Hy, and is so designated on some of the tombstones. At a very early period the island was also termed Icolmkill, or Icolmkill, the island of Colum of the cell or cemetery; while by the Highlanders it has been known as Innis-non-Druideach, the island of the Druids, from a tradition that the island was a seat of the Druids previous to its occupation by Columba. The term, however, has been otherwise interpreted to mean the isle of the artizans or workers, which seems appropriate enough to Columba and his disciples.

It was about the year 563 that Columba left Ireland, accompanied by twelve disciples, to Christianize the rude islanders of Albanich, or western Scotland, ruled over by Conal, king of the Dalriads. In Ireland (then named Scotia), he had, in consequence of his zeal in planting churches, earned the name of Columcille, or Columba of churches, and he had founded a noble monastery, named, from the number of oaks in the place, Dearnach (now Durrough, in King's County). Columba, however, having opposed Diarmid, King of Ireland, for refusing to release a freeman (apparently one of his disciples) was excommunicated by the Synod of Ireland, and by the advice of the Bishop of Clontarf, he repaired to Scotland. He obtained from Conal a grant of the island of Iona, then peopled by five families, and there founded his famous monastery and fixed his chief residence for the remaining thirty-four years of his life. A small bay and harbour, to the S.W. of the island, are still pointed out as the spot where Columba and his followers first landed, and on the shore is a large mound, sixty feet long, supposed to represent the size of the Corrach or boat which bore the saint to Iona. The original buildings of the monastery were of timber or wattle-work. The apostle of the Scots, according to Adomnan, sent forth his disciples to "gather bundles of twigs to build their hospice;" and for years the establishment at Iona must have been a humble missionary enterprise. A circle of stones, said to be the original cell or place of worship, remains on the island. Columba and his disciples were named Culdees, or hermit-worshippers, who sought divine assistance by prayer in the caves or woods, or secret corners of the island. Their zeal and devotion, however, soon led them to extend their labours, and to add to the number of the faithful. The neighbouring islands were converted, and Columba visited various parts of Scotland and Ireland, while his disciples penetrated into Orkney. Columba resided frequently among the Picts on the N. of the Grampians, and is said by Adomnan to have converted Brudeus the King of the Picts, who had his court at Inverness (ad ostiam Nessie). He had, however, to engage an interpreter in conversing with Brudeus, and this fact seems to prove that the Picts spoke a language different from the Celtic of Ireland or the Druid Scots. Columba also visited St Kentigern at Glasgow, and at Iona he inaugurated Aidan, king of the Scots. Having founded many churches and monasteries, all in some degree dependent on the parent monastery at Iona, Columba died about the year 597 within his own church at Iona, aged about seventy-seven. He had predicted the time of his own decease, and after ascending the hill which overlooked the monastery, gave it his blessing, and at midnight retired to the church, where he was found dead before the altar. The fond credulity of Adomnan has preserved many supernatural and miraculous legends relating to Columba; fable is blended with truth, and poetry has shed its undying light on the romantic traditions, but enough remains of unquestioned fact, and noble self-sacrificing exertion, to entitle Columba to rank with those great moral heroes who have gone forth to civilize and regenerate mankind.

The ecclesiastical rule or system of Iona is thus described by Bede, after the monastery had attained power and importance. "This island has for its ruler an abbot, who is a presbyter, to whose jurisdiction all the provinces, and even the bishops, by an unusual practice, are subject, according to the example of their first teacher, who was not a bishop but a presbyter and monk." The Culdees were a separate and independent sect. They differed from the Church of Rome as to the time for the observance of Easter and the form of the tonsure, which they cut according to the Eastern practice. About a century after the death of Columba, Adomnan, then Abbot of Iona, during a visit to Alfred, king of the Saxons, conformed to the Romish rites, and on his return attempted to induce his own people, and those subject to the monastery of Iona, to adopt his views. They refused to conform, and it was not till the year 716 that the monastery, at the intervention of Egbert, an English priest (who afterwards settled and died at Iona), adopted the Romish custom as to the observance of Easter. Foreign invaders now came to disturb and lay waste the infant colony. First, we learn from the Irish records (Tigernach's Annales) that the family of Hii, or the disciples of Columba, were, about 720, driven beyond Drumlanir by Nectan, king of the Picts. In 801, and again in 806, the monastery was burned by those pirates, sixty-eight of the inmates being on the latter occasion slain. A century afterwards the Danes ravaged the monastery and slew the abbot and fifteen monks. In 1097 Magnus Baerfæst, king of Norway, visited Iona, and allowed the people to retain their possessions. The monastery continued during the next century to be the resort of pilgrims, but it declined from its former importance. The simplicity of the Culdee worship had yielded to the power of the Church of Rome, and the monastery was appropriated to monks of the Cluniac order, subject to the bishops of Dunkeld. Between the years 1172 and 1180, William the Lion deprived them of certain churches and lands in Galloway, which he annexed to the canons of Holyrood. The island lords occasionally made donations to the church, and Donald of the Isles, who fought at Harlaw in 1411, is said to have presented vessels of gold and silver to the monastery, and to have become a monk of Iona. The last abbot, one of the council of the Lord of the Isles, becoming Bishop of the Isles, obtained in the year 1507 the annexation of Iona to his see. A nunnery had, about the thirteenth century, been in-

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1 Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides. This one eloquent sentence of Johnson, conceived in his best spirit, and expressed in his happiest manner, has perhaps done more than all other writings for the celebrity of Iona. The best historical account of the island is to be found in the Origines Parochiales, vol. II., Bannatyne Club, 1854. The ruins are carefully described by Mr Howson in a series of papers in the Camden Society's Transactions, Part III. It was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the nuns were of the order of St. Augustine and wore a white gown with a rochet of fine linen. There are few notices of this institution; but in 1509 King James IV. appears to have granted letters of protection to the prioress, and in 1574, the then prioress, with the consent of the convent, granted the lands which belonged to it to Hector Maclean of Duart.

At the era of the Reformation, the convention of estates in 1561 passed an act for the destruction of all abbeys and monasteries of idolatry, and the Synod of Argyle carried it out with unsparing rigour in Iona. Its conventual buildings were sacked and plundered; of 360 crosses said to have been then standing, only three were left, some being thrown into the sea, and others carried away to serve as tombstones in Mull and the neighbouring islands. A valuable library, with the psalters, and other books used by the monks, and the registers of Iona, also perished at this time. "That any of these may have been preserved in the abbey which rose upon the ruins of Columba's monastery, is, of course, mere conjecture; but though Boccaccio's fables about the books brought from Rome by King Fergus II. must be summarily rejected, there seems no reason to doubt the proposed visit of Pope Pius V. in 1460 to the library of Iona, or the alleged fact, that in 1525 several manuscripts were brought from Iona to Aberdeen, which, though much injured and nearly illegible, appeared to be fragments of Sallust and of some of our Scottish chronicles" (Origines Parochiales). Of all the excesses of these iconoclasts, this literary destruction is certainly the most to be deplored.

The ruins and relics of antiquity at Iona consist of part of the cathedral church of St. Mary, the nunnery, some small chapels, a building called the Bishop's House, and a number of ancient tombs and crosses. The cathedral is apparently not older than the thirteenth century. It is built of red granite in the usual cruciform shape, surmounted at the intersection of the nave and the transept by a square tower of about 75 feet in height. The building measures internally 115 feet from E. to W. Some grotesque figures, rudely carved, are seen on the columns; and in the chancel are the piscina and sedilia, which Mr. Howson considers to be of early English work. On the N. of the church were the cloisters, and, according to Martin, a library; and from a Norman arcade still standing, these appear to have been part of the oldest buildings. The principal altar of the church, formed of white marble veined with gray, existed almost entire in 1688, when Saebeverell visited Iona; and Pennant saw part of it in 1772, but it is now gone. In the choir are the tombs of Macleod of Macleod, Maclean of Ross, and the abbot John Mackinnon. The first represents the figure of a chief rudely carved, and the outline was apparently at one time filled with metal. The second is bolder and more artistic; the chief rests on a pillow, with his dog at his feet, a spear in his hand, a broadsword in his belt, and his shield presenting the figure of a galley. The figure on the tomb of the abbot is recumbent, and the inscription round the margin runs—Hic jacet Johannes Mac Pingone, Abbas de Hy, qui obit Domini millerimo quingentecimo, cujus animae propitietur Deus altissimus. Amen. In one of the cloisters of the church formerly lay the black stones, described by Pennant and Johnson, on which it was customary to swear oaths and ratify agreements.

The most ancient and interesting of the conventual remains is the chapel of St. Oran or Aran, with its burying-ground, a little city of the illustrious dead, that once enjoyed the privileges of a sanctuary. The chapel is small, measuring only 35 feet by 20 feet 8 inches. Its western doorway presents a Norman arch with the beak-head ornament. The burial place (described by Dean Monro as "a very fair kirkyard") bears in Gaelic the name of Reilig Oirran, and was the place of sepulture of the kings of Scots and Picts, down to the time of Malcolm III., who died in 1093, and of the lords of the Isles and chiefs, to a much later period. Shakspeare, it will be recollected, alludes to the interment of the "gracious Duncan" at Icolmkill:

"The sacred storehouse of his predecessors, And guardian of their bones."

And there, too, Macbeth, the murderer of Duncan, is said to have been buried. Dean Monro (who wrote in 1594) states that there were in this sepulchre three little chapels with marble inscriptions; one, Tumulus Regum Scotiae, in which were forty-eight Scottish kings—a palpable fiction or exaggeration;—the second, Tumulus Regum Hiberniae, containing four Irish monarchs; and the third, Tumulus Regum Norwegiae, containing eight Norwegian princes. There is now no vestige of such buildings, but a mound of earth is called, by tradition, the Ridge of Kings. South of the chapel is a red unpolished stone said to mark the grave of a king of France. The most ancient of the monumental stones bearing a date is that in memory of Abbot Lachlan Mackinnon in St. Oran's chapel, which is inscribed 1489. Those representing the broadsword across the body, or exhibiting the ancient Hebridean galleys (the stern and prow the same, and curved upwards like the Roman vessels), may be centuries older. Tombs of two bishops, of four priors of Iona, of several chiefs in armour, chiefly Macleans, are still to be seen in the Reilig Oirran; and in the chapel are similar memorials to Angus Og, a Macdonald of the Isles, the friend of Robert Bruce; to Macquarrie of Alva, Maclean of Gruin, and to one of the family of Campbell, son of the Earl of Argyll. Two of the undated stones bear inscriptions in the Irish character as follows—Or do annin Eogain (a prayer for the soul of Eogain) and Or do Mailpatric (a prayer for the soul of Mailpatrick). Celtic antiquaries, however, are not agreed as to these inscriptions, on which the dust of antiquity rests somewhat too strongly. Near the door of the chapel were to be seen, in 1772, the stones called Clach-na-broth, which had been substituted for three globes of white marble, always turned round by visitors, and which it was superstitiously believed were to wear through the pedant before the end of the world. The remains of the nunnery exhibit traces of Norman architecture. A chapel was attached to the institution, believed to be the burial-place of ladies of distinction, as the Reilig Oirran was appropriated to the graves of eminent men. The tomb of the last prioress, Agnes or Anne Maclean, bearing date 1543, is still left, though in a mutilated state. Of the ancient crosses, a few continue to "cast a melancholy splendour among the memorial tombs, and seem to preside over the grassy graves with a gray and ghastly beauty." Two magnificent stones of this kind are almost entirely perfect. One, known as Maclean's Cross, is 11 feet in height, and stands on a large basement of granite cut into three steps. The second, St. Martin's Cross, is about 15 feet in height. Both are richly carved in high relief with Runic knots and various emblemsatical devices and fanciful scrolls. The freedom of design, and its excellent execution in a material so ill adapted for sculpture as mica-slate, has often been remarked as surprising, and must strike the most incurious observer. The remains of some other crosses are visible, and there appear to have been several in the vicinity of the cathedral. As connected with the monkish period, one of the small harbours in the island bears the name of the Bay of Martyrs, being the place where the bodies of those who were to be interred in the holy ground were received by the monks. The sanctity of the island, and the mysterious veneration in which it was held, rendered Iona the favourite burying-place of all families of distinction; and there was an ancient Gaelic prophecy, that seven years before the end of the world a deluge was to sweep over Ireland and the green-clad island of Islay, but that the sainted island of Columba would rear her towers above the flood. Thus the notion of protection was mingled with the repu- tation of the island for sanctity in making it the resort of strangers to bury their dead. The tutelary saint, Columba, is believed, on certain evenings of the year, to be seen on the top of the church-tower counting the neighbouring islands.

"When o'er each Runic altar, weed-entwined, The vesper clock tolls mournful to the wind; Counts every wave-worn isle and mountain hoar, From Kilda to the green Ierne's shore."

Collins has also, in his Highland Ode, embodied the more magnificent superstition, that the tenants of the royal se- pulchres, in certain seasons at midnight, stalk forth in pa- gant robes and hold aerial councils. So late as the mid- dle of the last century, as related by Pennant, the people of Iona, every Michaelmas Day, rode their horses round the sacred circle of stones called Cnoc-nan-Aingeal, or the Hill of Angels, where Columba was believed to have met and conversed with angels. So long do poetical and super- natural beliefs cling to remote localities among a simple, credulous, and imaginative people!

Iona is separated from the Island of Mull by a navigable sound scarce a mile in width, and lies about eight miles S.W. from Staffa. The island possesses marble quarries, which have been opened and worked, but without success adequate to the necessary expenditure. On the S.W. shore are extensive rocks of sienite and serpentine. At Port-na-currach (the spot where Columba is said to have landed) are cliffs of hornblende, and nodules of hard steatite, of a fine green colour, which the children of the island col- lect and sell to strangers—rushing with them, on the ar- rival of the steam-boat, to the shores "where once came monk and nun with gentle stir." The soil of the island is light but fertile, and well fitted for the growth of oats, bar- ley, and rye. The pasture, though scanty, is of excellent quality, and the people of the island contrive to maintain and clothe themselves from their native products. They have now an Established and Free Church, with cheap and ample means of education.