in 1747), Bunting goes on to say that his first collection, published four years after the Belfast Festival, "was the only collection of genuine Irish harp music given to the world up to the year 1796." Throughout the Preface, Bunting states his displeasure at the treatment ancient Irish tunes had received at the hands of Sir John Andrew Stevenson, the arranger for Thomas Moore's extremely popular Irish Melodies series. While complimenting Moore's "elegant" poetry, Bunting "saw with pain, and still deplores the fact, that in these new Irish melodies, the work of the poet was accounted of so paramount an interest, that the proper order of song writing was in many instances inverted, and, instead of the words being adapted to the tune, the tune was too often adapted to the words, a solecism which could never have happened had the reputation of the writer not been so great as at once to carry the tunes he deigned to make use of altogether out of their old sphere among the simple and tradition – loving people of the country – with whom, in truth, many of the new melodies, to this day, are hardly suspected to be themselves." Bunting allots three different time periods to the music in his collection: "very ancient", "the ancient" and music "composed from the time of Carolan to that of Jackson and Stirling". "Very ancient" tunes are either "caoinans or dirges" or "airs to which Ossianic and other very old poems are sung". Despite his earlier arguments that words were unreliable, Bunting here uses their consistency to prove antiquity, meaning that if the same lyrics to a song are found wherever that song is sung, then it must be very ancient. Bunting also ascribes a particular "structure" to ancient songs, which he deliberates upon in his dissertation found later in this edition. Contrary to Thomas Moore's belief that modernity can be ascribed to all of the best native Irish airs, Bunting would put forth that the best airs are ancient and products of a time "when the native nobles of the country cultivated music as a part of education". Tunes with the label of "ancient" may be by unknown composers, but some were made by Scott, Lyons, Daly, Conallon, and O'Cahan. The third time frame contains pieces of "a more ornamental and less nervous style". Bunting tells us that music from this time period was