"By loving of a maiD,
One Catherine Mac CaBe,
My life it was betrayeD,
She's a dear maid on me."
Or this—
"I courted lovely Mary at the age of sixteeN
Slender was her waist and her carriage genteeL."
Or this from the County Dublin—
"When you were an acorn on the tree toP
Then was I an aigle[3] coCK,
Now that you are a withered ould bloCK
Still am I an aigle cock."
Or this from the County Cork—
"Sir Henry kissed behind the bush
Sir Henry kissed the QuaKer;
Well and what if he did
Sure he didn't aTe her!"
Upon the whole, however, that keen perception for the nuances of sound, and that fine ear which insisted upon a liquid rhyming only with a fellow liquid, and so on of the other classes, may be considered as almost wholly lost.
We now come to the great breaking up and total disruption of the Irish prosody as employed for a thousand years by thousands of poets in the bardic schools and colleges. The principles of this great change may be summed up in two sentences; first, the adoption of vowel rhyme in place of consonantal rhyme; second, the adoption of a certain number of accents in each line in place of a certain number of syllables. These were two of the most far-reaching changes that could overtake the poetry of any country, and they completely metamorphosed that of Ireland.