In the interim, I must not let the opportunity pass of vindicating our ancient bards from the false imputations of “busy and fantastic.”
If pride of descent be a weakness of Irishmen, it is one in which they are countenanced by all the nations of the globe who have had anything like pretensions to support the claim; and I fearlessly affirm that the more sensitive a people prove themselves of their national renown, their hereditary honour, and ancestral splendour, the more tenacious will they show themselves, in support of that repute,—whether as individuals or a community,—in every cause involving the far higher interests of moral rectitude, of virtue, and of religion. In the legitimate indulgence of this honourable emotion the Irish have ever stood conspicuously high. No nation ever attended with more religious zeal to their acts and genealogies, their wars, alliances, and migrations, than they did; and while no people ever excelled them in enterprise or heroism, or the wisdom and administration of their legislative code, so were they surpassed by none in the number and capability of those who could delineate such events, and impart to reality the additional charm of imagery and verse.
The bards were a set of men exclusively devoted, like the tribe of Levi amongst the Israelites, to the superintendence of those subjects. Their agency in this department was a legitimately recognised and graduate faculty; and, in accuracy of speech, the only one which merited the designation of learned, being attainable only after the most severe novitiate of preliminary study and rigid exercise of all the mental powers.
The industry and patience bestowed on such a course were not, however, without their reward. In a classical point of view this exhibited itself in the high estimation in which they were held—both amongst foreigners and natives—as poets, as prophets, and as philosophers; while the dignity and emolument attached to their situation, and the distinguished rank assigned them, at the general triennial assemblies of the state at Tara—with the endowments conferred upon them by the monarch and the several provincial kings—were sure to render it, at all times, an object of ambition and pursuit to members of the noblest families throughout the various parts of the realm.
The moral deportment and personal correctness of those literary sages contributed still further to add to their esteem; and, probably, I could not succeed better, in depicting the almost sanctity of their general behaviour, than by transcribing a stanza descriptive of the qualities which won to them, as a society, the mingled sentiments of veneration and of awe. It is taken from a very ancient Irish poem, and runs thus—
“Iod na laimh lith gan ghuin,
Iod na beorl gan ean neamhuib,
Iod na foghlama gan ean ghes,
Is iod na lanamh nas.”
That is—
“Theirs were the hands free from violence,
Theirs the mouths free from calumny,
Theirs the learning without pride,
And theirs the love free from venery.”
In later times I admit there was a lamentable degeneracy in the bardic class,—or rather the innumerable pretenders to the assumption of the name; and the “fescennine licentiousness” with which they violated the sanctity of domestic seclusion, in exposing the objects of their private spleen, tended not a little to bring their body into disrepute, and subject them additionally to the salutary restrictions of legislative severity. They were not less extravagant in the lavishment of their fulsome commendations; so that one can hardly avoid drawing a parallel between them and those poetasters, formerly, of Italy, whom Horace so happily describes in those remarkable hexameters, viz.:—
“Fescinnina per hunc invecta licentia morem,
Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit,
... quin etiam lex
Pœnaque lata malo quæ mallet carmine quenquam,
Describi.”[52]