THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 145

THE IRISH AGE OF GOLD

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men of the poet's own rank or above it, so that the poor, at least, had nothing to fear from his exactions. The Ullaves of Poetry were the voice of fame, the trumpets of public opinion, and honour was the breath of life of the Irish chieftain. He depended for his chieftainship in the main upon popular election; for the fittest man of the tribe, were he a ninth son, might be a candidate for the throne. Picture, then, the terrors of a hostile judgment from a learned versifier, one of whose satirical incantations, according to the popular legend, could visibly ' raise the three blisters of disgrace' upon the cheek of his victim. Loch Derg derives its name from the bloody eyeball which King Eochy plucked out of his head as the price which an insolent bard demanded for his performances. Power so great of course brought its abuses. It was probably in view of such a danger that the law laid down ' purity of hand, that inflicted no wound; purity of mouth, unstained by poisonous satire; purity of learning, to which no man could offer reproach; and purity in the marital relation,' as the four indispensable conditions of admission to the Order, and directed that any Ullave who violated these conditions in any particular should be stripped of half his. income and his dignity. In process of time, notwithstanding, the learned Doctor degenerated into the scurrilous balladist. A national Parliament was summoned for the expulsion from the country of the libellous crew. It took the pleading of the saintly Columbkille to save them. But that the saint should have intervened at all on their behalf shows how much merit, literary and national, must have still clung to the profession. Above all, what other country in the stormy seventh century was so little harried with domestic or foreign wars that its most serious anxiety was how to moderate the power of its poets? … continue reading »

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