The bards were still for a time trained in "the schools"--low thatched buildings shut away by a sheltering wood, where students came for six months of the year. None were admitted who could not read and write, and use a good memory; none but those who had come of a bardic tribe, and of a far district, lest they should be distracted by friends and relations. The Scottish Gaels and the Irish were united as of old in the new literature; Irish bards and harpers were as much at home in the Highlands and in the Isles as in Ireland, and the poems of the Irish bards were as popular there as in Munster. Thus the unity of feeling of the whole race was preserved and the bards still remained men who belonged to their country rather than to a clan or territory. But with the exile of the Irish chiefs, with the steady ruin of "the schools," poets began to throw aside the old intricate metres and the old words no longer understood, and turned to the people, putting away "dark difficult language" to bring literature to the common folk: there were even translations made for those who were setting their children to learn the English instead of their native tongue. Born of an untold suffering, a burst of melody swept over Ireland, scores and scores of new and brilliant metres, perhaps the richest attempt to convey music in words ever made by man. In that unfathomed experience, they tell how seeking after Erin over all obstacles, they found her fettered and weeping, and for their loyalty she gave them the last gift left to her, the light of poetry. In Leinster of the English, "the cemetery of the valorous Gael," Irish learning had a different story. There it seemed for a moment that it might form a meeting-point between the new race and the old, joining together, as the Catholics put it, "our commonwealth men," a people compounded of many nations, some Irish by birth and descent, others by descent only, others neither by descent nor by birth but by inhabitation of one soil; but all parts of one body politic, acknowledging one God, conjoined together in allegiance to one and the same sovereign, united in the fruition of the selfsame air, and tied in subsistence upon this our natural soil whereupon we live together.