Of their quickness and sharpness of understanding
These people being of a sharp and acute intellect, and gifted with
a rich and powerful understanding, excel in whatever studies they
pursue, and are more quick and cunning than the other inhabitants
of a western clime.
Their musical instruments charm and delight the ear with their
sweetness, are borne along by such celerity and delicacy of
modulation, producing such a consonance from the rapidity of
seemingly discordant touches, that I shall briefly repeat what is
set forth in our Irish Topography on the subject of the musical
instruments of the three nations. It is astonishing that in so
complex and rapid a movement of the fingers, the musical
proportions can be preserved, and that throughout the difficult
modulations on their various instruments, the harmony is completed
with such a sweet velocity, so unequal an equality, so discordant a
concord, as if the chords sounded together fourths or fifths. They
always begin from B flat, and return to the same, that the whole
may be completed under the sweetness of a pleasing sound. They
enter into a movement, and conclude it in so delicate a manner, and
play the little notes so sportively under the blunter sounds of the
base strings, enlivening with wanton levity, or communicating a
deeper internal sensation of pleasure, so that the perfection of
their art appears in the concealment of it:
"Si lateat, prosit;
- - ferat ars deprensa pudorem."
"Art profits when concealed,
Disgraces when revealed."
From this cause, those very strains which afford deep and
unspeakable mental delight to those who have skilfully penetrated
into the mysteries of the art, fatigue rather than gratify the ears
of others, who seeing, do not perceive, and hearing, do not
understand; and by whom the finest music is esteemed no better than
a confused and disorderly noise, and will be heard with
unwillingness and disgust.
They make use of three instruments, the harp, the pipe, and the
crwth or crowd (CHORUS). (22)
They omit no part of natural rhetoric in the management of civil
actions, in quickness of invention, disposition, refutation, and
confirmation. In their rhymed songs and set speeches they are so
subtle and ingenious, that they produce, in their native tongue,
ornaments of wonderful and exquisite invention both in the words
and sentences. Hence arise those poets whom they call Bards, of
whom you will find many in this nation, endowed with the above
faculty, according to the poet's observation:
"Plurima concreti fuderunt carmina Bardi."
But they make use of alliteration (ANOMINATIONE) in preference to
all other ornaments of rhetoric, and that particular kind which
joins by consonancy the first letters or syllables of words. So
much do the English and Welsh nations employ this ornament of words
in all exquisite composition, that no sentence is esteemed to be
elegantly spoken, no oration to be otherwise than uncouth and
unrefined, unless it be fully polished with the file of this
figure.
