“Good God!” said I, “what an idea does this give of the omnipotence of music and poetry among those refined enthusiasts, who have ever borne with such impatience the oppressive chain of power, yet suffer themselves to be soothed into slavery by the melting strains of the national lyre.”
“It is certain,” replied the priest, “that no nation, not even the Greeks, were ever attached with more passionate enthusiasm to the divine arts of poesy and song, than the ancient Irish, until their fatal and boundless indulgence to their professors became a source of inquietude and oppression to the whole state. The celebrated St. Columkill, who was himself a poet, became a mediator between the monarch, already mentioned and the ‘_tuneful throng_;’ and by his intercession, the king changed his first intention of banishing the whole college of bards, to limiting their numbers; for it was an argument of the liberal saint that it became a great monarch to patronize the arts; to retain about his person an eminent bard and antiquary; and to allow to his tributary princes or chieftains, a poet capable of singing their exploits, and of registering the genealogy of their illustrious families. This liberal and necessary plan of reformation, suggested by the saint, was adopted by the monarch; and these salutary regulations became the prominent standard for many succeeding ages: and though the severity of those regulations against the bards, enforced in the tyrannic reign of Henry VIII, as proposed by Baron Finglas, considerably lessened their power; * yet until the reign of Elizabeth their characters were not stripped of that sacred _stole_, which the reverential love of their countrymen had flung over them. The high estimation in which the bard was held in the commencement of the empire of Ireland’s archenemy is thus attested by Sir Philip Sidney:
* Item.--That no Irish minstrels, rhymers, thanaghs nebards, be messengers to desire any goods of any man dwelling within the English pale, upon pain of forfeiture of all their goods, and their bodies to be imprisoned at the king’s will.--Harris’s Hibernica, p. 98.
“‘In our neighbouring country,’ says he, ‘where truly learning grows very bare, yet are their poets held in devout reverence.’ But Elizabeth, jealous of that influence which the bardic order of Ireland held over the most puissant of her chiefs, not only enacted laws against them, but against such as received or entertained them: for Spenser informs us that, even _then_, ‘their verses were taken up with a general applause, and usually sung at all feasts and meetings.’ Of the spirited, yet pathetic manner in which the genius of Irish minstrelsy addressed itself to the soul of the Irish chief, many instances are still preserved in the records of traditional lore. A poem of Fearflatha, family bard to the O’Nials of Clanboy, and beginning thus:--‘O the condition of our dear countrymen, how languid their joys, how acute their sorrows, &c., &c.,’ the Prince of Inismore takes peculiar delight in repeating. But in the lapse of time, and vicissitude of revolution, this order, once so revered, has finally sunk into the casual retention of a harper, piper, or fiddler, which are generally, but not universally to be found in the houses of the Irish country gentlemen; as you have yourself witnessed in the castle of Inismore and the hospitable mansion of the O’D--------s. One circumstance, however, I must mention to you. Although Ulster was never deemed poetic ground, yet when destruction threatened the bardic order in the southern and western provinces, where their insolence, nurtured by false indulgence, often rendered them an object of popular antipathy, hither they fled for protection, and at different periods found it from the northern princes: and Ulster, you perceive, is now the last resort of the most ancient of the survivors of the ancient Irish bards, who, after having imbibed inspiration in the classic regions of Connaught, and effused his national strains through every province of his country, draws forth the last feeble tones of his almost silenced harp amidst the chilling regions of the north; almost unknown and undistinguished, except by the few strangers who are led by chance or curiosity to this hut, and from whose casual bounties he chiefly derives his subsistence.”