Captain of his guard, Mac Caffry his hereditary standard bearer, O'Gallagher his Marshal, O'Gnive his poet, and several other officers. The O'Gnives continued hereditary poets of Tyrone for a long period, in 1679, Lhuyd mentions the then bard of the name, from whom he informs us, he acquired an ancient Irish writing.—Stowe Cat. Vol. 1, p. 39.—In O'Conor's Dissertations will be found an English prose translation of part of the present poem. The original was addressed principally to the Native Chieftains, whose tottering and degraded state, and horrible persecutions during the reign of Elizabeth, are so powerfully portrayed. O'Gnive may be considered as the Tyrtæus not only of Ulster, but of Ireland. His poems, particularly the present, had no small influence in exciting O'Nial to carry fire and sword through the North, and rousing the ancient Irish nobility to arms against their oppressors in the other parts of the kingdom.
2"The word went forth."————
The proclamations of the Lord Justice Sussex, in 1563, against the Catholic Clergy, and to compel the people, under heavy fines, to frequent the new reformation service, are here alluded to. Of all the measures ever adopted, and there were many, to alienate the minds of the Irish from the English government, this pious solicitude for the safety of their souls, always proved the most effectual. Our ancestors, it seems, wished to go to heaven their own way, but that would not be permitted. The queen declared herself paramount over the souls of the Irish as well as their bodies, and this prerogative has been since stiffly maintained, formerly by the sword, and afterwards by penal laws, even to the present day. In the commencement of the reign of James the first, the principal charge brought against a refractory Irishman in Cork was, that "he swore an othe not to be governed by any Kinge, but such as should give him the libertie of his conscience."—Orig. MS. in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin.
