On every Saturday and the eve of every holiday the schools broke up, and the students dispersed themselves over the country. They were always gladly received by the landowners of the neighbourhood, and treated hospitably until their return on Monday morning. The people of the district never failed to send in, each in turn, large supplies to the college, so that, what between this and the presents brought by the students at the beginning of the year, the professors are said to have been fairly rich.
The schools always broke up on the 25th of March, and the holidays lasted for six months, it not being considered judicious to spend the warm half of the year in the close college, from which all light and air-draughts had been so carefully excluded.
I can hardly believe, however, that the students of law, history, and classics—all the educated classes could speak Latin, which was their means of communication with the English[25]—were treated as here described, or enjoyed such long holidays. It was probably only a special class of candidates for bardic degrees who were thus dealt with, and the account above given may be somewhat exaggerated; the students probably composed in their dark compartments only on certain days.
In the seventeenth century we find that the three or four hundred metres taught in the schools of the tenth century had been practically restricted to a couple of dozen, and these nearly all heptasyllabic. It is quite probable, as Thurneysen asserts, that the metres of the early Roman hymns—themselves probably largely affected by Celtic models—exercised in their turn a reflex influence upon Irish poetry, and especially on that of the bards, in contradistinction to that of the filés. Indeed, it is pretty certain that if the Roman metres had not before existed in Irish the bards would have made no scruple about copying them; and they may thus have come by these octosyllabic and heptasyllabic lines about which they were in after times so particular. Of the metres chiefly in vogue in the schools of the later centuries, the most popular was the Deibhidh, of which I have already given so many examples.[26] It was, as it were, the official metre—the hexameter of the Gael. All the seven thousand and odd lines of the "Contention of the Bards," for instance, are written in it. Great Rannaigheacht[27] [Ran-ee-ăcht] was another prime heptasyllabic favourite. It ran thus—
"To Hear Handsome Women WEEP,
In DEEP distress Sobbing Sore,
Or Gangs of Geese scream for FAR,
They sweeter ARE than ARTS snore."[28]
I may observe here that there has been on the part of Irish Continental scholars an extraordinary amount of discordant theories as to the scansion of the Irish classical metres. None of them seem to be agreed as to how to scan them. Zimmer insists that the word-accent and the metrical accent in Irish are identical, which, as Kuno Meyer has shown, is plainly not the case. He would probably scan—
"Or wíld geese thát scream fróm fàr,"
while Kuno Meyer again would insist on reading—
"Ór wild geése that scréam from fár,"