Ossian Collection > Ossian, his principal poems

Hi THE BARDS.
honour, both among the Gauls and Britons, He says
■' they compose poems somewhat elegant, which the rhap-
sodists recite either to the better sort, or to the vulgar, who
are very desirous to hear them ; and sometimes they sing
them to musical instruments." And in speaking of the
inhabitants of the Hebrides, or Western Islands, he says,
" that they sing poems containing the eulogies of valiant
men ; and their bards usually treat of no other subject."
Bards were capital persons at every festival, and at every
solemnity. Their songs, which, by recording the achieve-
ments of kings and heroes, animated every hearer, must
have been the entertainment of every warlike nation. So
strong was the attachment of the Celtic nations to their
poetry and their bards, that amidst all the changes of their
government and manners, even long after the order of the
Druids was extinct, and the national religion altered, the
bards continued to flourish ; not as a set of strolling song-
sters, like the Greek rhapsodists in Homer's time, but as an
order of men highly respected in the state, and supported by
a public establishment. We find them, according to Strabo
and Diodorus, before the age of Augustus ; and we find
them remaining under the same name, and exercising the
same functions as of old, in Ireland, and in the north of
Scotland, almost down to our own times. It is well known
that, in both these countries, every regulus or chief,* had his
* Every great Highland family had their bard, whose principal
business it was to amuse the chieftain and his friends, by reciting
at entertainments the great stores of poetry which he hoarded upon
his memory, besides which he also preserved the genealogy, and re-
corded the achievements of the family, which were thus traditionally
and successively handed down from generation to generation.