Note 8 — Chapter XXXIX
Reading edition
This poem begins—
"Togha teaghlaigh tar gach tír Beul átha na gcárr gclaidh-mhín Múr is fáilteach re file An dún dáilteach deigh-inigh."
I.e., "A choice hearth beyond every country, is the mouth of the ford of the cars [Belanagare], the smooth-ditched. A fortress welcome-giving to poet, the bestowing homestead of good generosity." The accented system had now been in vogue for nearly a century and a half, and if O'Curneen had wished to preserve an even rise and fall of accent in his verses (which he does do in his first line) he might have done so. That he did not do so, and that none of the straight-verse or classical poets attempted it, long after they had become acquainted with the other system, seems to me a strong proof that they did not intend it, and that they really possessed no system of "metrical accent" at all.
It is noticeable that O'Curneen wrote this poem in the difficult bardic dialect, so that Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, whose native language was Irish, was obliged in his copy to gloss over twenty words of it with more familiar ones of his own. These uncommon bardic terms were wholly thrown aside by the new school.