writing, th~ old Bardic .$chools kept aloof from them iand continued to transmlt their fore by oral methods. It was tonly about the thirteenth century that the Bards, having learned to write, began to commit their compositions to paper. To us it seems extraordinary that oral tradition could have survived so long. Ooleridge has said somewhere that "a fact ionce apprehended by the human mind is retained fo:r ever''. If people forget at times, it is because throngs of events cro;-Ai-d out 1the 1memory. 1 But ·even then the right note of suggestion will bring to the surface thing:s appiarently forg!otten. The Iife of lhe Donegal p€casant in bygone dr.ys \Vias much less ,eomplic:at~:l than nuns ; memory had fewer guests to entertain. \Vith the passage of time, unf.ortunate1y_, 1cir1cumstances arose in t1his country which not only imp2ired the memory, but dried up forever the .spring:s, of imemiory. Persecution first and then the awful famines of 1845 to 1847 did more than anything else to destroy IrE:1and's music ; fior the older people, repositories of the native lore, died in their tens of thousands before 'they bad time to bequeath their literary treasures to the younger .·generations. But for the zealous labours -0f a f€1w faithful recorders in the 18th and 19th centuries im10.st of our Irish music would have been irretrievably l'ost by the famines. And we can nerver be grateful enough to pioneers like Burke, Thumort:h, 1Edward Bunting \and George Petrie who did so much to salvage for posterity the numerous and precious gems of melody which 1we now possesr:s. And in this connedion we must not :f!Orget to pay tribute to one, the anniver- ·sary of 1whose death we have celebrated this year, Thomas Moure, our nationaJ poet, eminent scholar and a lover of his country. However much some people may find fault !With his methods of editing lour triaditional airs, they will agree that n:o man did more t:o make Irish music kno.wn and revered throughout the world. THE BARDIC SCHOOLS. It may not seem to be within the s:cope of this article to refer to the famous Bardic Schools of Ireland; yet I feel that they must be mentioned, because 1although the study of song .and music as such was not strictly within their province, the ::Sards truly laid the foundations on which much of our later music was built. ;And in any case, as we shall see, the Bardic Schools of Do neg.al 1were very famous. It is unlikely that 1we shall ever discover the ongm of these schools. "At what time they were founded We don't know," says Professor Bergin, "for the bardic o~:ier exisled in pre-historic times.'' They were c:lncient 1when St. Patrick came to our shores The sehool itsdf was a miniature university where the student learned not al0ne the intricacies of compo'sing Irish verse but in committing to memory the history of his country and of his cla.n and of perfecting himself in the rules of grammar, syntax 1and ellocution. The .course of studies was long. It took seven years of tr.aining to turn out •a fully-fledged File or Poet. It is interesting to note that the offices · of Ollamh or File and Bard were quite di:itinct. Th~ File it 1was 1who composed the nan (poem). The. ,function ot 1the Bard or Re'it1c.aire (as he was
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