Before Columba's time even the Church had become reconciled to
the bards and harpers; and, according to a beautiful legend,
Patrick himself had allowed Oisin, or Ossian, and his followers,
to sing the praises of ancient heroes. But Columbkill completed
the reconciliation of the religious spirit with the bardic
influence. Music and poetry were thenceforth identified with
ecclesiastical life. Monks and grave bishops played on the harp
in the churches, and it is said that this strange spectacle
surprised the first Norman invaders of Ireland. To use the words
of Montalembert, so well adapted to our subject: "Irish poetry,
which was in the days of Patrick and Columba so powerful and so
popular, has long undergone, in the country of Ossian, the same
fate as the religion of which these great saints were the apostles.
Rooted, like it, in the heart of a conquered people, and like it
proscribed and persecuted with an unwearying vehemence, it has
come ever forth anew from the bloody furrow in which it was
supposed to be buried. The bards became the most powerful allies
of patriotism, the most dauntless prophets of independence, and
also the favorite victims of the cruelty of spoilers and conquerors.
They made music and poetry weapons and bulwarks against foreign
oppression; and the oppressors used them as they had used the
priests and the nobles. A price was set upon their heads. But
while the last scions of the royal and noble races, decimated
or ruined in Ireland, departed to die out under a foreign sky,
amid the miseries of exile, the successor of the bards, the
minstrel, whom nothing could tear from his native soil, was pursued,
tracked, and taken like a wild beast, or chained and slaughtered
like the most dangerous of rebels.

"In the annals of the atrocious legislation, directed by the