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He is a master of grouping; he has a subtle eye for all the ramifications of a plot, he understands the relief in which the several characters are to stand. So we often sit together till midnight and after, pencil in one hand, note-book in the other, and exchange our thoughts half audibly. At one o'clock the housekeeper has orders to come in and tell us it is bed-time. If we do not stir, she puts the lamp out. Sometimes we are so full of our subject that we cannot go to bed, and we sit on till three o'clock, in the dark. If the housekeeper finds that we are not in bed at one o'clock she has orders to make a racket in the room, to bang the door, knock over the chairs, rattle the fire-irons to drown our conversation, and drive our ideas out of our heads."

S. BARING-GOULD.

THE POLITICAL POETRY AND STREET BALLADS OF IRELAND.

I

RISH patriots have hitherto plumed themselves, and with some reason, on the high standard of poetic excellence which their native poets attained; but nowadays they can make no such boast, for the poetry of Irish sedition has admittedly suffered deterioration; because, as it has been explained, the aims and means of latterday Irish popular leaders are so entirely practical as to exclude poetry as an appropriate medium for the excitation of the public mind in accordance with their desires. Plain prose they find much better suited to their purpose, and there is no doubt that much of it, in speech and writing, is very plain and to the point. This is perhaps to be regretted, for the patriotic ballad literature of Ireland had attraction for people who were not at all in sympathy with the motives or objects of the writers. For instance, the ballad and general poetry of the Young Ireland party of 1848 elicited high encomiums from many distinguished English writers and reviewers. At the same time there is little about it that is distinctively Irish. Indeed some of the Young Ireland writers themselves confessed that they quite failed to reproduce, either by imitation or translation, the mode of expression and manner of thought of the bards of Ancient Ireland; and they freely admitted that the ballad literature they themselves created was in form and spirit wholly Anglo-Saxon, and as such quite antagonistic to the native genius of the people--that in fact it was feudal, not Celtic, in derivation, and therefore in tone and tendency foreign to the Celtic language and literature. So accurate was this estimate of their labour that experts on the Irish language like Bishop MacHale, O'Curry, and O'Donovan, declared that it was all but impossible to transmute any of the songs and ballads of Young Ireland into Irish, so as to retain their meaning and method unimpaired. But enough remains in the work accomplished by the translators and imitators of the poetry of the Irish bards to show that it was instinct with a passion and rude grace of fancy that is very captivating. That it won the approval of so stern a hater of the Irishrie as

Edmund Spenser is much in its favour. In his "View of Ireland” the "divine Edmund" tells us how he had caused some of the songs of the Irish to be translated for him, and that "surely they savoured of sweete witte and good invention, but skilled not of the goodly ornamentes of poetrye; yea, they were sprinckled with some prety floures of their owne naturall devise, which gave good grace and comliness unto them, the which it is greate pittye to see soe abused, to the graceing of wickedness and vice, which with good usage would serve to beautifye and adorne vertue." The "wickedness and vice" however, which the poet reprobated, existed evidently in his own imagination and were epithets doubtless employed to stigmatise the fervid patriotism, and not the supposed immorality, by which the songs were characterised.

The Irish language was in almost universal use at the period that the bards spoken of by Spenser flourished, and indeed for long after that. It died hard. In some districts even at the present day it is employed by many of the people. And, perforce, the bards continued to use it down to a comparatively late period, for it was the tongue in which naturally Irish treason would find expression out of deference to the hostility of the alien ruling power. And for the same reason the popular songs and ballads from the time of Queen Elizabeth down to the middle of the last century that have survived to the present day, were handed down from father to son, and never appeared in print either in the vernacular or in English dress, until some fifty years ago, when they were rescued from oblivion by O'Curry, O'Donovan, and other accomplished Celtic scholars.

Most of this poetry, needless to say, is animated with the most fervid patriotism and hatred of the Saxon oppressor; as in this paraphrase of a passage in a well-known Gaelic song::

Though the Saxon snake unfold

At thy feet his scales of gold,
And vow thee love untold,

Trust him not, green land!

Touch not with gloveless clasp
A coiled and deadly asp,

But with strong and guarded grasp

In your steel-clad hand-

Nor were the poets mealy-mouthed in describing the prowess of the Irish warriors, and in recording their triumphs over the Saxon foe, as the following shows:

Oh! then down like a torrent with an hurrah we swept,

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And full stout was the Saxon who his saddle true kept;

For we dashed through their horsemen till they reeled from the stroke,

And their spears like dry twigs with our axes we broke

VOL. CCLVIII. No. 1854.

SS

But he acters from Ormond will ye brag in your hall,

Low par Lori was stuck down with his mailed knights and all?
Swm it natnight the shannon, beard the wolf in his den,

Ere you nie to Mycastel on a foray again!

But the native bards are seen to better advantage in their less warlike moods-when they mourn the wrongs of their country, prefigured as a beauteous maiden, and waiting deliverance, as thus :My love hard riches once and beauty

Want and woe have paled her cheek,
And stalwart hearts for honour's duty-
Now they crouch like cravens sleek.
Oh, Heaven! that ere this day of rigour
Saw sons of heroes, abject, low,

And blood and tears thy face disfigure,
Ma Chreevin evin alga O!

In the following verses, from an excellent translation by Clarence Mangan, of a famous and vastly popular song, "My Dark Rosaleen," the same idea is embodied :

Over hills and through dales

Have I roamed for your sake,
All yesterday I sailed with sails
On river and on lake.
The Erne at its highest flood

I dashed across unseen,

For there was lightning in my blood

My dark Rosaleen !

My own Rosaleen !

Oh there was lightning in my blood,

Red lightning lightened through my blood,
My dark Rosaleen !

Oh! the Erne shall run red

With redundance of blood,

The earth shall rock beneath her tread,

And flames wrap hill and wood;

And gun peal and slogan cry,

Wake many a glen serene,

Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,

My dark Rosaleen !

My own Rosaleen!

The judgment hour must first be nigh,

Ere you can fade, ere you can die,

My dark Rosaleen.

The Jacobite songs in Irish are very spirited. They are brimful of hate of the Saxon, and their tendency is more to instigate resistthan to promote the restoration of the Stuart dynasty. say, my Brown Drin in!" sung to a beautiful air,

may be yet heard in the South of Ireland. "Drimin" is the favourite name of a cow, by which Ireland is allegorically denoted :

Oh say my brown Drimin, thou silk of the kine!
Where, where are thy strong ones, last hope of thy line?
Too deep and too long is the slumber they take,

At the loud call of freedom why don't they awake?

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When the Prince, now an exile, shall come for his own,

The isles of his father, his rights, and his throne—

My people in battle the Saxons will meet,

And kick them before like old shoes from their feet.

The "White Cockade" is another Jacobite song that even at the present time is sung in remote parts of the country :—

King Charles he is King James's son,

And from a royal line is sprung;

Then up with shout, and out with blade,
And we'll raise once more the white cockade.

Oh! my dear, my fair-haired youth,
Thou yet hast hearts of fire and truth;

Then up with shout, and out with blade,

And raise once more the white cockade.

Another of these ballads called "The Avenger " has much verve. It runs :

The Avenger shall lead us right on to the foe,

Our horn should sound out, and our trumpets should blow,
Ten thousand huzzas should ascend to high heaven,

When our Prince was restored, and our fetters were riven.

Oh! chieftains of Ulster, when will you come forth,

And send your strong cry on the wings of the north?

The wrongs of a King call aloud for your steel,
Red stars of the battle, O'Donnell, O'Neal !
Bright house of O'Connor, high offspring of kings,
Up, up, like the eagle when heavenward he springs !
Oh! break ye once more from the Saxon's strong rule,
Last race of Macmarchod, O'Byrne, and O'Toole..

These extracts, however, give but a faint idea of the wealth of passionate tenderness and fiery fervour to be found in the minstrelsy of Ancient Ireland, and it is but faintly re-echoed by the poets of later days.

Most of the rebel ballads of '98 were also written in Irish. Of the most popular of these, "The Wearing o' the Green,” there are many versions. That which speaks of Ireland as

The most distressful country that ever yet was seen,

For they're hanging men and women there for wearin' o' the green,

has been popularised amongst us by having been introduced into a

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