There were minstrels who held honourable offices in the great households, sometimes chosen for their skill and elocution to perform the dignified service of heralds, and were in the secret confidence of their Lord; these were those favourites of the castle, whose guerdon was sometimes as romantic as any incident in their own romance. No festival, public or private, but there the minstrel poet was its crowning ornament. They awakened national themes in the presence of assembled thousands at the installation of an abbot, or the reception of a bishop.[5] Often, in the Gothic hall, they resounded some lofty "Geste," or some old "Breton" lay, or with some gayer Fabliau, indulging the vein of an improvvisatore, altering the old story when wanting a new one. Delightful rhapsodists, or amusing tale-tellers, combining the poetic with the musical character, they displayed the influence of the imagination over a rude and unlettered race-- ----They tellen Tales Both of WEEPYING and of GAME. Chaucer has portrayed the rapture of a minstrel excited by his harp, a portrait evidently after the life. Somewhat he _lisped_ for his wantonness _To make the English swete upon his tonge_; And in his Harping when that he had songe, _His Eyen twinkled in his Hed aright, As don the Sterrés in a frosty night_. The minstrel more particularly delighted "the Lewed," or the people, when, sitting in their fellowship, the harper stilled their attention by some fragment of a chronicle of their fathers and their father-land. The family harper touched more personal sympathies; the ancestral honours of the baron made even the vassal proud--domestic traditions and local incidents deepened their emotions--the moralising ditty softened their mind with thought, and every county had its legend at which the heart of the native beat. Of this minstrelsy little was written down, but tradition lives through a hundred echoes, and the "reliques of ancient English poetry," and the minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and some other remains, for the greater part have been formed by so many metrical narratives and fugitive effusions.