the ethereal pleasure, which the combined power of music and poetry creates, could allow himself to think, that the song of the poet, which is not only the source of soft and dissolving joy, but of noble and heroic exertion, should not owe its origin to that invisible power, whose influence seemed to hallow and animate the mind of the bard?

The bard of fame,

Taught by the gods to please, when high he sings
The vocal lay responsive to the strings.

There is no country in which poetry and music were held in higher estimation, or cultivated to a greater extent, than in Ireland. After ages had elapsed in hostilities with the English, the same ardent love of song continued among the people of this country. "There is "among the Irish," says Spencer, "a certain "kind of people called bards, which are to "them instead of poets, whose profession is "to set forth the praises or dispraises of men " in their poems or rithmes; the which are had in "so high regard and estimation amongst them, "that none dare displease them, for fear to run "into reproach through their offence, and to be "made infamous in the mouths of all men. For "their verses are taken up with a general applause, and usually sung at all feasts and

"to be translated to me, that I might under"stand them, and surely they savoured of "sweet wit and good invention; but skilled "not of the goodly ornaments of poetry: yet "were they sprinkled with some pretty flowers "of their natural device, which gave good grace and comeliness unto them."

There can be no doubt, that the ancient poetry of the Irish was similar in its general character to that of the Highlanders. The few fragments which remain possess the same pathos and sublimity of sentiment. But it must be acknowledged, that the number of such fragments is indeed small : not that the quantity of Irish poetry is scanty; for of this commodity there exists a very great abundance.* It is of the lofty and polished strains of poetry, that there is a scarcity, which may, no doubt, be accounted for in various ways, but chiefly by that important revolution which the circumstances, and sentiments, and songs of the bards experienced in the twelfth, and especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Soon after the first of these periods, the taste for the marvellous prevailed: the chaste and beautiful tales of the times of old began to be interlarded with stories of giants, and saints, and miracles;

* See note B.

and the elegant simplicity which seems to have characterized the muse of earlier days, was greatly lost amid the incoherence of extravagant fiction, Perhaps there Perhaps there may be some truth in Percy's remark as to the origin of this wretched taste: "that after letters began to prevail, "and history assumed a more stable form, by being committed to plain simple prose, the songs of the scalds or bards began to be more amusing than useful. And in proportion as it "became their business chiefly to entertain and delight, they gave more and more into embel"lishment, and set off their recitals with such 'marvellous fictions, as were calculated to "captivate gross and ignorant minds.Ӡ

This remark evidently implies that the only minds which the bards had in their power to captivate by their tuneful art were gross and ignorant. This general position as it regards some countries might be disputed; but it is perfectly just as it respects Ireland subsequent to the sixteenth century. After this period, when the native chieftains were nearly extirpated, the bards were obliged to accommodate their songs to the taste of the multitude, on whom they became dependent for subsistence. This very multitude daily became more

* Walker's Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards.
Essay on Anc. metric Romances. Reliques, v. 2

gross in their conceptions, in consequence of the circumstances to which I have already alluded; and the taste of those poets, of whom they were the only patrons, must of course have been gradually debased. Besides, both poets and people, when they were deprived of their own native lords, and hated and persecuted by the English, were resigned into the government of priests, whose ignorance and intolerance, and total want of elevation of mind, or refinement of taste, consummated that state of degradation into which they had already fallen. This circumstance ought to be particularly remarked, since it forms a new era in the history of the Irish nation. If it did not occasion a total change in the genius of the national poetry, it completed a change which had formerly been begun ; and in the progress of this revolution, it was impossible that the feelings, and sentiments, and character of the people should have escaped the influence of deterioration. They were placed in a new climate, where the sky was cloudy, where the air was noxious, and where a constitution, which otherwise was good, became sickly.

That nation must indeed be fallen, or it must have been always low in the scale of moral and intellectual attainment, in which a superstitious

priesthood bears the sole authority. While there is not a surer criterion of the degradation of human nature, there certainly does not exist a more powerful barrier to its general improvement. And in place of saying with Dr. Adam Smith that a nation is poor in proportion as the church is rich, I should say, that it is poor in all the noble qualities of mind, in proportion as an ignorant and superstitious tribe of ecclesiastics have the interests and power of a nation under their controul.

Yet such are the circumstances in which the native people and poets of Ireland were placed at the period to which I refer. The bards, whose genius in other times was consecrated to the ennobling task of celebrating the praises of heroes, of forming and elevating the virtues of the living by applauding those of the dead, having now scarcely any other patrons than the multitude and the priests, were employed in praising the power of the pope, the miracles and goodness of ambiguous saints, and the wonders of St. Patrick's Purgatory; subjects worthy of the debased taste of such wretched patrons. To this remark, there may, indeed, have been some glorious exceptions, who, though they partly conformed to the times in which they lived, often thought and composed as if their destiny had been placed in happier ages: