Note 418 — Chapter VI

For an account of the ancient bards of Gaul, see the Benedictine Hist. Lit. de la France, vol. i. part i. pp. 25–28. Those of Scotland are noticed in Barry's Hist. of the Orkney Islands, p. 89; and for a modern instance in the island of Col, near Mull, see Otter's Life of Clarke, vol. i. p. 307. As to the Irish bards in the seventh century, see Sharon Turner's Hist. of England, vol. iii. p. 571. Spenser's account of them in the sixteenth century (Somers Tracts, vol. i. pp. 590, 591) shows that the order was then falling into contempt; and in the seventeenth century this is confirmed by Sir William Temple; Essay on Poetry, in Temple's Works, vol. iii. pp. 431, 432. But it was not till the eighteenth century that they became extinct; for Mr. Prior (Life of Goldsmith, vol. i. pp. 36, 37) says, that Carolan, ‘the last of the ancient Irish bards,’ died in 1738. Without them the memory of many events would have been entirely lost; since, even at the end of the seventeenth century, there being no registers in Ireland, the ordinary means of recording facts were so little known, that parents often took the precaution of having the names and ages of children marked on their arms with gunpowder. See Kirkman's Memoirs of Charles Macklin, 8vo. 1799, vol. i. pp. 144, 145, a curious book. Compare, respecting Carolan, Nichols's Illustrations of the Eighteenth Century, vol. vii. pp. 688–694.