When the great gathering, or Parliament, was held periodically at Tara, County Meath, there was minstrelsy in the banquet-hall after every day’s business. The last Parliament, or Feis, of Tara, was held in 560 under Fergus; and never more after that gathering was the “harp heard in Tara’s halls.” An Irish saga of the Seventh Century describes nine Irish harpers as having “gray winding cloaks, with brooches of gold, circlets of pearls round their heads, rings of gold around their thumbs, torques[89] of gold around their ears, and torques of silver around their throats.” Trinity College, Dublin, owns a harp that is supposed to have belonged to King Brian, “Brian Boru,” the hero, who was slain in the hour of victory over the Danes at Clontarf near Dublin in 1014. His harp was rescued by his son, who took it to Rome and gave it to the Pope. It is the old hand-harp of the minstrels. In 1185 Giraldus, appointed by King Henry II tutor to his son, Prince John, accompanied the latter to Ireland. On his return he wrote a book describing the remarkable things he had seen in that country and paid the following tribute to the Irish harpers: “The cultivation of instrumental music by this people I find worthy of commendation. In this their skill is _beyond all_ comparison superior to that of any nation I have ever seen; for their music is not slow and solemn, as in the instrumental music of Britain to which we are accustomed; but the sounds are rapid and articulate, yet at the same time sweet and pleasing. It is wonderful how, in such precipitate rapidity of the fingers the musical proportions are preserved, and by their art, faultless throughout, in the midst of the most complicated modulations and most intricate arrangements of notes; by a velocity so pleasing, a regularity so diversified, a concord so discordant, the melody is preserved harmonious and perfect; and whether a passage, or transition, is performed in a sequence of fourths or fifths, it is always begun in a soft and delicate manner, and ended in the same, so that all may be perfected in the sweetness of delicious sounds. They enter on and again leave their modulations with so much subtlety and the vibrations of the smaller strings of the treble sport with so much articulation and brilliancy, along with the deep notes of the bass; they delight with so much delicacy and soothe so charmingly, that the great excellence of their art appears to lie in their accomplishing all this with the greatest seeming ease and without the least appearance of effort, or art.” The Welsh harpists learned from the Irish, as Wharton, in his _History of English Poetry_, testifies: “There is sufficient evidence to prove that the Welsh bards were early connected with the Irish. Even so late as the Eleventh Century the Welsh bards received instruction in the bardic profession (music and poetry) from Ireland.”