oy the same honors and
privileges; some of them even were slaves; according to their
standing, different kinds of verse were assigned to them as a
monopoly.

The Danish invasions in the ninth century set back for some time the
development of Irish poetry, but, when the Irish had driven the
fierce and aggressive sea-rovers from their country, there was a
literary renascence. This was in turn checked by the Anglo-Norman
invasion in the twelfth century, and thereafter the art of
versification was no longer so refined as it had formerly been.
Nevertheless, the bardic schools still existed in the seventeenth
century, more than four hundred years after the landing of Strongbow,
and, in them, students followed the lectures of the _ollamhs_ for six
months each year, or until the coming of spring, exercising both
their talents for composition and their memory.

A catalogue of Irish poets, which has recently been made out, shows
that there were more than a thousand of them. We have lost many of
the oldest poems, but the Irish scribes often modernized the texts
which they were copying. Hence the language is not always a
sufficient indication of date, and it is possible that, under a
comparatively modern form, some very ancient pieces may have been
preserved. Even if the poems attributed to Amergin do not go back to
the tenth century B.C., as has been claimed for them, they are in any
case old enough to be archaic, and certain poems of the mythological
cycle are undoubtedly anterior to the Christian era.

We have reason to believe that there have been preserved some genuine
poems of Finn macCumaill (third century), a hymn by St. Patrick (d.
461), some greatly altered verses of St. Columcille (d. 597), and
certain hymns written by saints who lived from the seventh to the
ninth century. The main object of the most celebrated of the ancient
poets up to the end of the twelfth century was to render history,
genealogy, toponomy, and lives of saints readier of access and easier
to retain by putting them into verse-form; and it is the names of
those scholars that have been rescued from oblivion, while lyric
poetry, having as its basis nothing more than sentiment, has remained
for the most part anonymous. After the Anglo-Norman invasion, the
best poet seems to have been Donnchadh Mor O'Daly (d. 1244). Of later
date were Teig MacDaire (1570-1652), Teig Dall O'Higinn (d. 1615),
and Eochaidh O'Hussey, who belonged to the seventeenth and ei