artist, all was fish that came to his net. But the conventional dressed-up eighteenth century "Nature" of Savage was a very different thing from the naked Nature of Brian's poetry.
It is clear, however, that Brian came in contact with minds that the other Gaelic poets never encountered. It is generally to be found that the external circumstances of writers' lives tend to form their minds and the exceptional intellect requires a fair opportunity of developing itself. The average Gaelic poet certainly got very little chance of intellectual development. I am convinced that Brian's chances were at least far better than the ordinary.
XIII.
The poem at once attained popularity. Its freedom from stilted language and archaism, its welding of the spoken speech into musical lines made it appeal to the educated and illiterate alike. Many manuscript copies were made, many people memorised it. It is one of those poems whose lines, once read, ring in the ears and live in the memory.
Dr. P. W. Joyce wrote in 1879: "Three years ago I met a man in Kilkee . . . who actually repeated for me, without the slightest hitch or hesitation, more than half—and if I had not stopped him, would have given me the whole of the 'Midnight Court.'" Truly a wonderful testimony to the poem's popularity!
It was not only in County Clare, but throughout Munster that the poem found admirers, and passages of it are still quoted by "illiterate" native speakers of Irish. A pious old Kerry lady repeated to me a passage from the second part of the "Cúirt" some years ago, to my astonishment.
It is a fact, however strange, that none of the daring passages in the "Cúirt" drew down on their author any
