* Item.--That no Irish minstrels, rhymers, thanaghs nebards, be messengers to desire any goods of any man dwelling within the English pale, upon pain of forfeiture of all their goods, and their bodies to be imprisoned at the king’s will.--Harris’s Hibernica, p. 98. “‘In our neighbouring country,’ says he, ‘where truly learning grows very bare, yet are their poets held in devout reverence.’ But Elizabeth, jealous of that influence which the bardic order of Ireland held over the most puissant of her chiefs, not only enacted laws against them, but against such as received or entertained them: for Spenser informs us that, even _then_, ‘their verses were taken up with a general applause, and usually sung at all feasts and meetings.’ Of the spirited, yet pathetic manner in which the genius of Irish minstrelsy addressed itself to the soul of the Irish chief, many instances are still preserved in the records of traditional lore. A poem of Fearflatha, family bard to the O’Nials of Clanboy, and beginning thus:--‘O the condition of our dear countrymen, how languid their joys, how acute their sorrows, &c., &c.,’ the Prince of Inismore takes peculiar delight in repeating. But in the lapse of time, and vicissitude of revolution, this order, once so revered, has finally sunk into the casual retention of a harper, piper, or fiddler, which are generally, but not universally to be found in the houses of the Irish country gentlemen; as you have yourself witnessed in the castle of Inismore and the hospitable mansion of the O’D--------s. One circumstance, however, I must mention to you. Although Ulster was never deemed poetic ground, yet when destruction threatened the bardic order in the southern and western provinces, where their insolence, nurtured by false indulgence, often rendered them an object of popular antipathy, hither they fled for protection, and at different periods found it from the northern princes: and Ulster, you perceive, is now the last resort of the most ancient of the survivors of the ancient Irish bards, who, after having imbibed inspiration in the classic regions of Connaught, and effused his national strains through every province of his country, draws forth the last feeble tones of his almost silenced harp amidst the chilling regions of the north; almost unknown and undistinguished, except by the few strangers who are led by chance or curiosity to this hut, and from whose casual bounties he chiefly derives his subsistence.”