The _File_, or poet in the more restricted sense of the word, soon became a pest and a nuisance. He was willing enough to eulogize when he expected liberal rewards; but if he were disappointed in his hopes, or if from any other cause he wished to inflict the lash of his satire on any person, he never spared the poisoned shafts of his flashing wit. Hence Cormac Mac Cullinan, who knew the tribe well, derives _File_, the old Irish word for poet, from _fi_, poison, and _li_, brightness; because in eulogy the poet is bright, but in satire he is venomous. The poets were extortionate, too, in exacting rewards for their eulogistic verses, so that the order came to be more feared than loved, and at length incurred the danger of extinction, as we shall see further on. Hence, too, it is expressly ordained in the _Senchus Mor_ that the poet who demands an excessive reward, or claims an amount to which he is not entitled, or composes unlawful satire, is to be deprived of half his 'honour price' for the first and second offence, and of his full honour price, or social status, for the third. Among the four dignitaries of a territory who might be degraded, besides the false-judging king, the stumbling bishop, and the unworthy chief, was the fraudulent poet, who demanded an exorbitant reward for his compositions. No man was qualified to become Chief-poet, or Doctor in Poetry--'Ollamh-poet'--who was not able to compose an extempore stanza on any subject proposed to him. And the way in which it is done is this: "When the poet sees the person or thing before him he makes a verse at once with the ends of his fingers, or in his mind without studying, and he composes and repeats at the same time."[18] This, however, was after the reception of the New Testament in the time of St. Patrick. "Before Patrick's time the poet placed his (divining) staff upon the person's body, or upon his head, and found out his name, and the name of his father and mother, and discovered every unknown thing that was proposed to him in a minute or two or three." But St. Patrick abolished these profane rites amongst the poets when they believed, for they could not be performed without offering to idol gods, and thenceforward he made the profession pure.[19]