Note 4. Stapza x.

The Filea of O'Neale was he.

had at the fyrst to cause them to weare gownes of sylke, furred with myneuere and gray; for before these kynges thought themselfe well apparelled whan they had on a mantell. They rode always without saddles and styropes, and with great payne I made them to ride after our usage.»-LORD BERNERS' Froissart, Lond. 1812. 4to. II, 621.

The influence of these bards upon their patrons, and their admitted title to interfere in matters of the, weightiest concern, may be also proved from the behaviour of one of them at an interview between Thomas Fitzgerald, son of the Earl of Kildare, then about to renounce the English allegiance, and the Lord Chancellor Cromer, who made a long and goodly oration to dissuade him from his purpose. The young lord had come to the council «armed and weaponed,» and

mail; and we are assured that the chancellor, having set forth his oration « with such a lamentable action as his cheeks were all beblubbered with teares, the horsemen, namelie, such as understood not English, began to diuine what the lord-chancelor meant with all this long circumstance; some of them reporting that he was preaching a sermon, others said that he stood making of some heroicall poetry in the praise of the Lord Thomas. And thus as every ideot shot his foolish bolt at the wise chancellor his discourse, who in effect did nought else but drop pretious stones before hogs, one Bard de Nelan, an Irish rithmour, and a rotten sheepe to infect a whole flocke, was chatting of Irish verses, as though his toong had run on pattens, in commendation of the Lord Thomas, investing him with the title of Silken Thomas, bicause his horsemens jacks were gorgeously imbrodered with silke: and in the end he told him that he lingered there ouer long. Whereat the Lord Thomas being quickened,» Hollinshed expresses it, bid defiance to the chancellor, threw down contemptuously the sword of office, which, in his father's absence, he held as deputy, and rushed forth to engage in open insurrection.

The Filea, or Ollamh Re Dan, was the proper bard, er, as the name literally implies, poet. Each chieftain 1 of distinction had one or more in his service, whose office was usually hereditary. The late ingenious Mr Cooper Walker has assembled a curious collection of particulars concerning this order of men in his Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards. There were itinerant bards of less elevated rank, but all were held in the highest veneration. The English, who considered them as chief supporters of the spirit of national independeace, were much disposed to proscribe this race of poets, as Edward I. is said to have done in Wales. Spenser, while he admits the merit of their wild poetry, as savouring of sweet wit and good invention, and sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their natural de-attended by seven score horsemen in their shirts of vice, yet rigorously condemns the whole application of their poetry, as abased to « the gracing of wickedDess and vice. The household minstrel was admitted even to the feast of the prince whom he served, and sat at the same table. It was one of the customs of which Sir Richard Sewry, to whose charge Richard II. committed the instruction of four Irish monarchs in the civilization of the period, found it most difficult to break his royal disciples, though he had also much ado to subject them to other English rules, and particularly to reconcile them to wear breeches. «The kyng, my soverigne lords entent was, that in maner, countenaunce, and apparell of clothyng, they sholde use according to the maner of Englande, for the kynge thought to make them all four knyghtes: they had a fayre house to lodge in, in Duvelyn, and I was charged to abyde styll with them, and not to departe; and so two or three dayes I suffered them to do as they lyst, and sayde nothyng to them, but folowed their owne appetytes; they wolde sytte at the table, and make countenance nother good nor fayre. Than I thought I shulde cause them to chaunge that maner; they wolde cause their mynstrells, their seruauntes, and varlettes to sytte with them, and to eate in their owne dyssche, and to drinke of their cuppes; and they shewed me that the usage of their countre was good, for they sayd in all thyngs (except their beddes) they were and lyved as Leomen. So the fourthe day I ordayned other tables to be couered in the hall, after the usage of Englande, and I made these four knyghtes to sytte at the hyghe table, and their mynstrels at another borde, and their seruanates and varlettes at another byneth them, whereof by semynge they were displeased, and beheld each other, and wolde not eate, and sayde, how I wolde | take fro them their good usage, wherein they had been Then I answered them smylyng, to apeace them, that it was not honourable for their estates to do as they dyde before, and that they must leave it, and use the custom of Englande, and that it was the Kynges pleasure they shulde do so, and how he was charged so to order them. Whan they harde that, they I suffred it, bycause they had putte themselfe under the obeyance of the kynge of Englande, and parceuered in the same as long as I was with them; yet they had one ase which I knew was well used in their countre, and that was, they dyde were no breches; I caused breches of lynen clothe to be made for them. Whyle I was Iwith them I caused them to leaue many rude thynges, as well in clothyng as in other causes. Moche ado I

norished.

Note 5. Stanza x.

Ab, Clandeboy! thy friendly floor,
Slieve-Donard's oak shall light no more.

1

as

Clandeboy is a district of Ulster, formerly possessed by the sept of the O'Neales, and Slieve-Donard a romantic mountain in the same province. The clan was ruined after Tyrone's great rebellion, and their places of abode laid desolate. The ancient Irish, wild and uncultivated in other respects, did not yield even to their descendants in practising the most free and extended hospitality, and doubtless the bards mourned the decay of the mansions of their chiefs in strains similar to the verses of the British Llywarch Hen on a similar occasion, which are affecting, even through the discouraging medium of a literal translation:

Silent-breathing gale, long wilt thou be heard!
There is scarcely another deserving praise,
Since Urien is no more.

Many a dog that scented well the prey, and aerial hawk,
Have been trained on this floor
Before Erlleon became polluted

This hearth, ab, will it not be covered with nettles!
Whilst its defender lived,

More congenial to it was the foot of the needy petitioner.

HOLLINSHED, Lond. 1808, 4to. vol. VI, p. 291.

preads over the adjoining hill; on the fourth, by mea- were the lady on whose account she had been sent for, dews which are watered by the river Kennet. Close on and a man of a haughty and ferocious aspect. The e side of the house is a thick grove of lofty trees, lady was delivered of a fine boy. Immediately the dong the verge of which runs one of the principal ave- man commanded the midwife to give him the child, mus to it through the park. It is an irregular building and catching it from her, he hurried across the room, af great antiquity, and was probably erected about the and threw it on the back of the fire, that was blazing time of the termination of feudal warfare, when defence in the chimney. The child, however, was strong, and came no longer to be an object in a country mansion. by its struggles rolled itself off upon the hearth, when Many circumstances, however, in the interior of the the ruffian again seized it with fury, and, in spite of house, seem appropriate to feudal times. The hall is the intercession of the midwife, and the more piteous very spacious, floored with stones, and lighted by large entreaties of the mother, thrust it under the grate, and, transom windows, that are clothed with casements. Its raking the live coals upon it, soon put an end to its walls are hung with old military accoutrements, that life. The midwife, after spending some time in affordhave long been left a prey to rust. At one end of the ing all the relief, in her power to the wretched mother, hal is a range of coats of mail and helmets, and there was told that she must begone. Her former conductor is on every side abundance of old-fashioned pistols and appeared, who again bound her eyes, and conveyed her , many of them with matchlocks. Immediately behind him to her own home: he then paid her handbelow the cornice hangs a row of leathern jerkins, made somely, and departed. The midwife was strongly agiin the form of a shirt, supposed to have been worn as tated by the horrors of the preceding night; and she armour by the vassals. A large oak table, reaching nearly immediately made a deposition of the fact before the from one end of the room to the other, might have magistrate. Two circumstances afforded hopes of defeasted the whole neighbourhood, and an appendage to tecting the house in which the crime had been comone end of it made it answer at other times for the old mitted; one was, that the midwife, as she sate by the game of shuffle-board. The rest of the furniture is in bedside, had, with a view to discover the place, cut out a suitable style, particularly an arm-chair of cumbrous a piece of the bed-curtain, and sewn it in again; the workmanship, constructed of wood, curiously turned, other was, that as she had descended the staircase, she with a high back and triangular seat, said to have been had counted the steps. Some suspicions fell upon one ad by Judge Popham in the reign of Elizabeth. The Darrell, at that time the proprietor of Littlecot-house, entrance into the hall is at one end by a low door, com- and the domain around it. The house was examined, municating with a passage that leads from the outer and identified by the midwife, and Darrell was tried at door in the front of the house to a quadrangle within; Salisbury for the murder. By corrupting his judge, he at the other, it opens upon a gloomy staircase, by which escaped the sentence of the law, but broke his neck by you ascend to the first floor, and, passing the doors of a fall from his horse in hunting, in a few months after. | some bed-chambers, enter a narrow gallery which ex- The place where this happened is still known by the tends along the back front of the house from one end name of Darrell's Stile,-a spot to be dreaded by the to the other of it, and looks upon an old garden. This peasant whom the shades of evening have overtaken gallery is hung with portraits, chiefly in the Spanish on his way. dresses of the sixteenth century. In one of the bedchambers, which you pass in going towards the gallery, is a bedstead with blue furniture, which time has now made dingy and threadbare, and in the bottom of one of the bed-curtains you are shown a place where a small piece has been cut out and sewn in again,-a circumstance which serves to identify the scene of the following story:

It was on a dark rainy night in the month of November, that an old midwife sate musing by her cottage áre-side, when on a sudden she was startled by a loud knocking at the door. On opening it she found a horseman, who told her that her assistance was required imImediately by a person of rank, and that she should be handsomely rewarded, but that there were reasons for keeping the affair a strict secret, and, therefore, she must submit to be blind-folded, and to be conducted in that condition to the bed-chamber of the lady. With some hesitation the midwife consented; the horseman bound her eyes, and placed her on a pillion behind him. After proceeding in silence for many miles, through rough and dirty lanes, they stopped, and the midwife was led into a house, which from the length of her | walk through the apartments, as well as the sounds about her, she discovered to be the seat of wealth and power. When the bandage was removed from her yes, she found herself in a bed-chamber, in which

I think there is a chapel on one side of it, but am not quite sure.

<<< Littlecot-house is two miles from Hungerford, in Berkshire, through which the Bath road passes. The fact occurred in the reign of Elizabeth. All the important circumstances I have given exactly as they are told in the country; some trifles only are added, either to render the whole connected, or to increase the impression.>>

With this tale of terror the author has combined

some circumstances of a similar legend, which was current at Edinburgh, during his childhood.

About the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the large castles of the Scottish nobles, and even the secluded hotels, like those of the French noblesse, which they possessed in Edinburgh, were sometimes the scenes of strange and mysterious transactions, a divine of singular sanctity was called up at midnight, to pray with a person at the point of death. This was no unusual summons; but what followed was alarming. He was put into a sedan-chair, and, after he had been transported to a remote part of the town, the bearers insisted upon his being blindfolded. The request was enforced by a cocked pistol, and submitted to; but in the course of the discussion he conjectured, from the phrases employed by the chairmen, and from some part of their dress, not completely concealed by their cloaks, that they were greatly above the menial station they had assumed. After many turns and windings, the chair was carried up stairs into a lodging, where his eyes were uncovered, and he was introduced into a bed