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They taught them to serve in the church, to sing the plain-song, and to the accompaniment of the organ; to play the flute, to dance, and to sing; and to play the harp, guitar, and other instruments. In this they show very great adaptability, especially about Manila; where there are many fine choirs of chanters and musicians composed of natives, who are skilful and have good voices.
Many names of these ancient poets are recorded, but of their poetry, previous to Homer, not even a fragment remains. The bards or chanters of epic poetry were called Rhapsodists, from the manner in which they delivered their compositions; this name was applied equally to the minstrel who recited his own poems, and to him who declaimed anew songs that had been heard a thousand times before.
The choir gallery is over the main entrance, and there a great revolving music-stand is still in use, with several of the large and interesting illuminated manuscript singing-books of the early days. In Mission days it was generally the custom to have two chanters, who took care of the singing and the books.
The top-dog spirit was fast oozing out of me, and I sat there sourly dusting the skirts of my poor country-tailor-made coat. The men were lined up on the rough moorland track, Donald at their head, and the two pipers filling their bags and fingering their chanters behind him.
Rogers and Lavinia Pepper had ceased to criticise, except as pertained to unimportant incidentals, and were now among the loudest of the praise chanters. And as Captain Zeb Mayo said: "When Didama and Laviny stops fault-findin', the millennium's so nigh port a feller ought to be overhaulin' his saint uniform." But what worried Mrs. Coffin was John Ellery's personal appearance and behavior.
She did not smear her hair with mud, nor was she moved by the wailing of the mourning women nor the chanters of the Koran. She only said to Fatima when all was over: "It is well; he is gone from my woe to the mercy of God! Praise be to God!" And she held her head high in the village still, though her heart was in the dust.
After this appeared two torches borne by the chanters, then the curé, with stole, surplice, cope, and biretta. Four altar-boys escorted him, a fifth carried the holy-water basin, and in the rear came the sacristan. He got up on the raised edge of the hole in which stood the poplar tree, adorned with tri-coloured ribbons.
Ballad-singers, or rather chanters or croakers, are often to be met with in the streets, but hand-organ players are not more frequent than in our cities. I still observe little girls and other children barelegged and barefooted on the wet sidewalks.
Malachy, adverting to the state of the Irish church on the promotion of that saint to the episcopacy, he describes how the new bishop soon found out that he had to do with "brutes and not with men; how that nowhere he had met with such barbarism of every sort; nowhere found a race so perverse in their morals, so savagely opposed to religious rites, so impious towards the faith, so headstrong against discipline, so barbarous towards the laws, so filthy in their habits of life; a people, Christians in name, but heathens in practice, who paid no tithes, who contracted no lawful marriages, who never confessed their sins, who had hardly any one among them to ask or give a penance, in whose churches neither the voice of the preacher nor the chorus of the chanters was ever heard."
At the summit of the hill they stopped with the icon; the men who had been holding it up by the linen bands attached to it were relieved by others, the chanters relit their censers, and service began. The hot rays of the sun beat down vertically and a fresh soft wind played with the hair of the bared heads and with the ribbons decorating the icon. The singing did not sound loud under the open sky.
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