[35] "Ni mhair sgoluidhe sgéil teinn
D'uibh nDálaigh ná d'uibh n-Uiginn."
From a manuscript of my own.
[36] "Reliquiæ Celticæ," vol. ii. p. 297. Last stanza.
[CHAPTER XXXIX]
RISE OF A NEW SCHOOL
In poetry the external form, or framework, or setting of the poetic thought—the word-building in which the thought is enshrined—has varied vastly from age to age and from nation to nation. There is the system of the Greeks and Romans, according to which every syllable of every word is, as it were, hall-marked with its own "quantity," counted, that is, (often almost independently of the pronunciation) to be in itself either short or long, and their verse was made by special collocations of these short or long syllables—a form highly artistic and beautiful.
Then there is the principle of the Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, and Teutonic peoples, which prevailed in England even down to the time of Chaucer, in which verse is marked only by accent and staff-rhyme, in other words is alliterative as in the "Book of Piers Ploughman."
Lastly, there is the rhymed poetry of the later Middle Ages, of which outside of Wales and Ireland there probably exists no example in a European vernacular language older than the ninth century. This system, apparently invented by the Celts, assumed in Ireland a most extraordinary and artificial form of its own, the essence of which was that they divided the consonants into groups,[1] and any consonant belonging to a particular group was allowed to rhyme with any other consonant belonging to the same. Thus a word ending in t could rhyme with a word ending in p or c, but with no other; a word ending in b could rhyme with one ending in g or dy but with no other, and so on. Thus "rap" would have been considered by the Irish to make perfect rhyme with "sat" or "mac" but not with "rag"; and "rag" to make perfect rhyme with "slab" or "mad," but not with "cap," "sat" or "mac."
This classification of the consonants which was taught in the Irish schools for very many hundred years, and which forms the basis of the classical poetry which we spoke of in the last chapter, is to a considerable extent—I do not quite know how far—founded upon really sound phonological principles,[2] and the ear of the Irishman was so finely attuned to it that no mistake was ever made, for while such rhymes as "Flann" and "ram" fell agreeably on his ear, any Irish poet for a thousand years would have shuddered to hear "Flann" rhymed with "raff." This accurate ear for the classification of consonants is now almost a lost sense, but even still traces of it may be found in the barbarous English rhymes of the Irish peasantry, as in such rude verses as this from the County Cavan—