Whether these literary records existed in a written form at the time of the Roman occupation,[1] we need not here discuss. The extraordinary and, to us, abnormal retentiveness of memory by a literary class specially trained for this purpose makes the committal of records to writing almost a superfluity in some stages of a people’s civilisation; even to-day, or up to recent years, a story-teller or poet of the Western Highlands or of Connaught, to go no farther than our own countries, can recite tales or poems in his native Gaelic hour after hour, without the omission of a single word; though the loss of his own language, and the education of the schools, which give another line to his thoughts, and another method to their expression, speedily stamp out this remarkable faculty wherever they are brought into play. In Gaul and Britain, as we know from Roman writers, the office of bard and genealogist or historian was a very highly-esteemed one; they ranked in honour next to the king or chief, and they performed several important functions in the state. This record of the classical writers is fully borne out by Irish documents, from which we are made conversant with the whole system of the bards, with their lengthy education, extending over a period of twelve years, with the subjects that they were required to know, the various grades through which they must pass to arrive at the highest position, and the honours and exact emoluments and rank to which the attainment of each stage entitled them. The enormous mass of literary material that has come down to us from Ireland, bearing the unmistakable mark of having been composed in pre-Christian times, and at a stage of social advance on a level with the Homeric age in Greece, shows that, however it was transmitted, we have lost little by the methods of its transmission. What we have lost has been by the partial destruction of manuscripts in later ages, and particularly in times quite near our own, when the knowledge of the language in
- ↑ Caesar says that in Gaul the Druids purposely abstained from committing their records to writing in order to strengthen the memory and to ensure secrecy (Gallic War, vi. 14).
