her, retained his long locks although having to pass through a hostile district on his way to see her; he was taken by the English, beheaded, and his head spiked on a tower; and the mournful air is said to be the lament of the despairing maiden:

"Her heartbreaking notes we remember them well,

But the words of her wailing no mortal can tell."

Nobly did the bards exert themselves during the long Elizabethan wars, keeping alight the blaze of nationality and animating chieftains and clansmen in their fierce struggle for liberty. Heartily loyal and devoted to the imperiled cause of country, they were true as steel, fierce as tigers, magnificent in their exhortations to unity and resistance. Spencer, the English poet, shivering in possession of confiscated land, denounced them: "Whomsoever they find to be most licentious of life, most bold and lawless in his doings, most dangerous and desperate in all parts of disobedient and rebellious disposition, him they set up and glorify in their rithems; him they praise to the people and to young men to make an example to follow." Spencer, expelled from his usurped meadows, died of hunger in London. The Irish bards, outlawed and hunted, were put to death when caught, not only by the English but by such Irish titled tools as Conor O'Brien, Earl of Thomond, who gibbeted three of the most distinguished of the order. Yet, high above the roll of war, rose ever the thrilling music of harps and voices in the "Rosg Catha," the "Eye of Battle," the fierce Milesian warsignal.

To this stirring period of embattled Irish chivalry belongs "Roisin Dubh" (Dark Little Rose), which is still sung in peasant homes-the supposed address, written by his own bard, of gallant Red Hugh O'Donnell to Ireland, chiefest

object of his affections. Mangan's vigorous translation preserves the spirit, not the metre. And to it belongs the impassioned appeal of O'Gnimh, or Agnew, bard of O'Neill of Clandeboy, which has been done into English verse by Sir Samuel Ferguson:

"We starve by the board,

And we thirst amid wassail-
For the guest is the lord,

And the host is the vassal!

"Through the woods let us roam,

Through the wastes wild and barren;
We are strangers at home!
We are exiles in Erin!
"And Erin's a bark

O'er the wide waters driven!'
And the tempest howls dark,

And her side planks are riven!
"And in billows of might

Swell the Saxon before her,-
Unite, oh, unite!

Or the billows burst o'er her!"

The billows did burst, and in the melancholy night of defeat that followed we hear the bard Hussey lamenting the sad lot of his master, the Maguire, a lone fugitive in the woods under pelting rain and sleet, and the bard MacWard mourning over the dead princes of Tyrone and Tirconnell. The triumphant harp strains that accompanied the pealing Te Deum in the abbey church of Donegal in celebration of the victory of the Yellow Ford were changed to chilling laments by the disaster of Kinsale and the subsequent flight of the earls.

In the seventeenth century occurred the "Contention of the Bards," a kind of musical and metrical competition between Ulster and Munster, the northern province being mainly championed by Lewy O'Clery and Robert MacArthur, the southern by Art Oge O'Keefe and Teige MacBrodin. The last-named, who was chief bard of Thomond and resided in the castle of Dunogan, in western Clare, started the dispute by a censure on a poem of Torna the Learned, bard

of Niall the Great, and nearly all the bards of North and South joined in what proved to be the last Irish bardic tournament. Later came the "curse of Cromwell," spreading over Ireland a more terrible red cloud than hung over Emania the night of the slaughter of the sons of Usna. Several bards perished, among them Teige MacBrodin, who was killed by an Irish-speaking follower of Cromwell. "Abair do rainn anois, fear beg" (Say your verses now, little man), said the truculent slayer, ere he hurled the old bard to death over a precipice.

One of the last typical members of the Bardic college-taught in his youth by the MacEgans of Ormond and O'Dayorens of Thomond, and learned in four languages-was fine old Duald MacFirbis, last of the hereditary antiquarians of Hy-Fiachrach, to whom for his various works on Irish history, Ireland stands indebted as much as to the Four Masters. In 1670, at the age of eighty, he was wantonly murdered at Dunflin, county Sligo, by an alien in creed and race, a young squireen of the Crofton family.

But the household bards, harpers and singers of the old school, the last stately wearers of the five-colored robes, whose inspiring music had been the life and fire of the clans, were now practically extinct. The grass was springing in many a chieftain's hall where their songs had resounded; the weeds were rustling over their lone graves beneath crumbling abbey walls. In the war of the Revolution the character and acts of Righ Shemus were not such as to greatly inspire the Irish national muse of the period; the fugitive Stuart had but few laments sent after him, though "sad was the wail" that marked the departure of Lord Lucan and the gallant Wild Geese:

"Farewell, O Patrick Sarsfield! may luck

be on your path!

Your camp is broken up, your work is marred for years,

But you go to kindle into flame the King of France's wrath,

Though you leave poor Erin in tears. ✶✶✶

But O'Kelly still is here, to defy and to toil; He has memories that hell won't permit him to forget

And a sword that will make the blue blood run like oil

Upon many an Aughrim yet."

Of course, when the Irish struggle assumed the Jacobite phase, there were minstrels to interpret it, their songs resounding in the dark penal gloom. The plaintive and exquisite "Blackbird”the name by which the exiled Stuart, so-called James III, was alluded to by his Irish sympathizers-became a national favorite; it was sung in Irish peasant homes even late in the last cen

And the chief national air was "The White Cockade," in reference to the Jacobite emblem, the white rose of York. It was the marching tune of the Irish troops in the service of France. The May morning breeze bore it to the ears of Cumberland's square column advancing up the slopes of Fontenoy, and, as the English soldiers looked towards the sound of the drums and fifes and saw the scarlet steel-topped lines of the Brigade forming for the memorable charge, they knew, in the words of a Scotch writer, "when the slaughter would deepen and when the bloodiest resistance would be made."

It was in 1692, the year after the fall of Limerick, that a young bard, mounted, accompanied by an attendant bearing his harp, set out from Alderford House, in the north of Roscommon, to make his living by singing and playing in the homes of the gentry. The young man was blind; if an Irish peasant boy was blind or lame his lot was to become a professional musician; sometimes, if only lame, a schoolmaster. Turlough O'Carolan was stricken with blindness, from smallpox, at eighteen, and it was four years later that he entered on his itinerant musical career, that lasted nigh

half a century. Many a house he vis-
ited, especially of the ruined Catholic
nobility, and many the maidens whose
charms he celebrated with his wondrous
gift of melody-a gift which the coun-,
try people believed he had acquired dur-
ing his long meditative retreats in the
fairy rath near his dwelling. Veiled
though his sight, bright chaplets of
poetic pearls he flung over many a fair
head from Louth to Mayo, including
that of his own first love, Bridget
Cruise. "My eyes are transplanted to
my ears," he said. Also was his sense
of touch acute and delicate. Once,
when on a pilgrimage to St. Patrick's
Purgatory, in an island in Lough Derg,
a lady kindly took the blind bard's hand
to assist him out of the boat. "By the
hand of my gossip," he exclaimed, "this
is the hand of Bridget Cruise!" And
so it proved:

"True love can ne'er forget;
Fondly as when we met,
Dearest, I love thee yet,

My darling love!"

Fannie Power of Lough Liagh, Fannie Betagh of Lough Mannin, Gracie Nugent of Culambre, Kathleen Tyrrell, Bride O'Malley, Mary Maguire of Tempo (his wife)-O'Cowlan's tributes to feminine grace and beauty constitute a veritable "dream of fair women." Like other Gaelic bards he claimed an omen in his music. Asked to praise in song a young lady named Brett, he gloomily complained that his harp emitted for her only notes of sorrow. Which reminds one of Scott's Allan Bane:

"I strike the chords of joy, but low And mournful answer notes of woe." And Miss Brett, it is said, died within the year. Great was the blind bard's memory for music. Geminiani, the famous musician, played over on his violin a difficult concerto in the presence of O'Carolan; the latter, although hearing it for the first time, repeated it

accurately on his harp, and even offered to give the assembly a composition of his own in similar style, which he immediately did, and, says his fellow countryman, Oliver Goldsmith, "that with such spirit and excellence that we may compare it (for we have it still) with some of the finest compositions of Italy."

With proper inspiration Turlough excelled in extempore versemaking. He was happiest in the homes of the old Irish gentry. "Ah, here in the house of O'Conor, my harp has the right old sound," he was wont to declare. Once, at a banquest given by an English grazier named Harlowe, he was asked to give a planxty in honor of the host"something like what he used to compose for the O'Haras." The unsuspecting bard complied, but, when he had finished his eulogistic strains, Kane O'Hara, whom O'Carolan had not known was present, arose and affected to rate the singer for comparing him and his family to "that bullocker Harlowe," whereupon the bard promptly struck his harp again and sang his "Cupan geal O'Headhra" (O'Hara's bright cup):

"Oh, were I at rest

Amid Arran's green isles,
Or in climes where the summer
Unchangeably smiles,
Though treasures and dainties
Might come at my call,
Yet O'Hara's bright cup

I would prize more than all."

It was as deft an improvisation in its way as Cyrano de Bergerac's ballade composed while he clashed swords with the Viscount de Valvert: "A la fin de l'envoi je touche."

O'Carolan died in 1738 and was buried with high funeral honors in the vault of his benefactors, the MacDermotts Roe, in the ancient churchyard of Kilronan.

The last minstrel thus laid to rest, the sadly frayed poetic garments descended on the hunted hedge schoolmasters, on

the poor ballad-singers. Many of the former produced poems still treasured; some of the latter began to dabble in the language of the Sassenach, with special fondness for sonorous polysyllables, and produced the first of the great and grotesque crop beginning, "As I roved out one morning," or "Ye tenderhearted Christians, I hope ye will draw near." The ballad-singer, as a topical rhymester, a musical newsman, became, with his quaint "come-all-ye," the humble successor of the old bardic storyteller. But the harpers had passed

away.

In Ulster, by the Presbyterian insurgents of 1798, the green flag was introduced as the national banner of Ireland, and national songs began to be sung in the language of the national enemy, Dr. William Drennan being the first high bard of the new school. Bunting, Hardiman and others made collections of the ancient music. Moore selected a number of the old airs and wedded unto them his immortal melodies. In the intensity of the present Gaelic revival, some enthusiasts there are who would put "Moore's melodies" outside the pale of Irish music-a spasm of extravagant puristry. The piano is merely the Irish harp laid flat and struck with keys in lieu of fingers. Omitting dilettantic scruples anent "tone" and "setting," if "Moore's melodies" are not Irish, what are they? The antique gems may have. been slightly altered in the cutting, but still they glow with Celtic fire and genius.

"Oh! sweet were the minstrels of kind InisFail!

'As truagh gan oidhir 'n-a bh-farradh!' Whose music, nor ages, nor sorrow can spoil;

'As truagh gan oidhir 'n-a bh-farradh!' But their sad stifled tones are like streams flowing hid,

Their 'cavine' and their 'piobracht' were chid, And their language that melts into music' forbid;

'As truagh gan oidhir 'n-a bh-farradh!'"

"A pity without an heir in their company!" But heirs "go leor" to the spirit of the Celtic bards of old appeared in the brilliant galaxy of '48 and afterwards; men who, although perforce they "sang their land, the Saxon's slave, in Saxon tongue," were as strongly Irish in idea as the fiercest old "filea" that ever cursed a cattle-lifting English viceroy. These left Ireland a new bardic literature, everything but an Irish national anthem-though, for this position, "Who Fears to Speak of 'Ninetyeight?" the eloquent lay of single-song Ingram of Trinity, challenges popularity with T. D. Sullivan's "God Save Ireland."

For many decades afterwards the sword remained the backbone of Irish national poetry: to be popular a song had to be like a Harmodian wreath, fragrant as native whitethorn, with the glint of steel shining through. The new bardic order was as attractive as it was fiery and aggressive, and its members, good, bad and indifferent, became numerous as were their organized predecessors in the days of Columbkille. A rifle, a green flag and a hillside whereon to fight or fall were the main elements of a typical national poem, and British officialdom remained long in alarm at the superabundance and popularity of rhymed "sedition."

Then gradually appeared the select but less healthy tear-and-smile school principled by Alfred Percival Graves and the coarse stage-Irishman revival and horse-collar buffoonery of "Ballyhooley" Martin and his votaries. It appears that Mr. Graves' sole political poetic essay has been a crude parody of "The Wearing of the Green"-how frowned the shade of the old "croppy" who composed it!-in celebration of Queen Victoria's most gracious condescension in permitting her Irish soldiers to wear the shamrock, the better to encourage them, oh, Guelphic stolidity! to fight the Boers. This loyal

parody was duly sung at the aged queen, on the occasion of her visit to Dublin, by the rollicking young West Britons of Trinity College, as related with emotion by the gushful "Penelope" Wiggin of Massachusetts. The tearand-smile school has produced several sweetly cultured jingles relative to fragrant blossoms and woodland dells and peasant lovers, and archly humorous. ones, as of Father O'Flynn, who was "the pride of them all." But, as in the minstrel's doom-shadowing harp, there are certain silent or unresponsive chords in the singers' harps, although the songs themselves may have appropriate sound

in a "shoneen's" house, with a government official turning the music and a landgrabber's daughter warbling at the piano.

The grand old bards of the five-colored robes are fast in their many-centuried sleep. The winds sing O'Carolan's requiem. Moore's harp stands mute and dusty in an Irish museum. Yet at intervals, sweet and clear as lark notes from the sky of Spring, we hear the voice of some lone poet of the green isle raised responsive to the Spirit of Irish poetry and song-glorious in the past, hopeful as to the future-"to show that still she lives."