This ballad is said to have been founded on a fact which occurred in a remote country chapel at the time when exertions were made to put down faction-fights among the peasantry.

THE old man he knelt at the altar
His enemy's hand to take,

And at first his weak voice did falter,
And his feeble limbs did shake;
For his only brave boy, his glory,

Had been stretch'd at the old man's feet,

A corpse, all so haggard and gory,

By the hand which he now must greet.

rage

And soon the old man stopp'd speaking,
And which had not gone by,
From under his brows came breaking
Up into his enemy's eye-

And now his limbs were not shaking,

But his clench'd hands his bosom cross'd,
And he look'd a fierce wish to be taking
Revenge for the boy he had lost!

But the old man he looked around him,
And thought of the place he was in,
And thought of the promise which bound him,
And thought that revenge was sin-

And then, crying tears, like a woman,

"Your hand!" he said "aye, that hand!

And I do forgive you, foeman,

For the sake of our bleeding land!"

A certain gallant major, a stipendiary magistrate, some thirty years ago was quizzed by the English press, for a bull he committed in an official report to Government on the state of the south-western provinces. He said, the best proof of returning tranquillity was, that the people had recommenced their faction-fights. Now, a most expressive meaning lay beneath this apparent contradiction, as is frequently the case in that figure of speech entitled an Irish bull, for it was a fact, that, whenever the peasantry were leagued in unlawful combinations against constituted authority, they ceased to fight among themselves.

We must not weep for you.

My grandsire died, his home beside;
They seized and hanged him there;

His only crime, in evil time,

Your hallowed green to wear.

Across the main his brothers twain

Were sent to pine and rue;

And still they turn'd, with hearts that burn'd,

In hopeless love to you

In hopeless love to you.

Dear land

No name is given to claim the authorship of these passionate lines. There are many who would not like to father the politics of the song;-there are none who might not be proud of its poetic paternity. But, passing its higher claims, it is worthy of notice for facility of expression;-the meaning is never involved for an instant, though it runs through difficult passages of double rhymes, thus increasing the mechanical difficulty. The model of its rythmical structure is to be found, if I am not much mistaken, in one of the most beautiful of Moore's songs in his National Melodies:

I knew a young man of great talent and strong feeling who loved that song, and the writer of that song, and all the writer of that song loved; and I am inclined to think that early acquaintance of mine was the author of this fervid song-"Dear Land."

In the introduction to this section I spoke of the difficulty of dealing with such a class of songs; and in making the foregoing selection a careful abstinence has been desired, and I hope observed, from the use of any specimen in which expressions of extreme bitterness or

harsh offensiveness occur. There are a good many of the political songs of Ireland much more emphatic in epithet, much more intense in terms, on both sides of the question, which, however safe-I will even say interesting to read, by those who can look upon them as mere literary relics-the ashes of fires burnt out-might nevertheless arouse feelings in many readers which the pages of this book were never meant to awaken.

I wish it to be believed that it is not want of information, on my part, of the existence of such combustible material that prevented me from making a blazing section in my book, but a desire, which I am sure the wise and the gentle-hearted will respect, to avoid even the risk of exciting angry passions.

I could give examples, from what might be called specially the REBEL and ORANGE Songs of Ireland, of the extreme ferocity to which political feelings may hurry us-and by a contrast (not unusual in human nature) touches of tenderness are close beside these passionate outbreaks, like spots of verdure on the edge of the volcano-but I will content myself with merely touching on two or three small portions of such fierce examples, to show that it is not from my ignorance of the existence of such compositions that they do not appear in this volume. There is a rebel song illustrative of the tenderness I have alluded to, and giving, also, the other aspect of feeling. The rebel is supposed to contemplate flight to a foreign land; he dare not appear in his native place again, and he exclaims,—

"Then farewell father, and mother too,
And sister Mary :-I have but you !—
A thousand guineas you would lay down
If I might walk in Wexford town."

I think there is great tenderness in this verse.

But he must not

walk in Wexford town-for there are those there who are singing a fierce song on the other side of the question, the refrain of which is,—

"Holy water,

Slaughter, slaughter

Sprinkle the Catholics every one,

We'll cut them asunder

And make them lie under,

And Protestant boys shall carry the day."

Well-the fugitive who has sung the plaintive strain has not done his song yet; he contemplates coming back to Ireland on some future day, and, after lamenting his hard lot in being expatriated, he concludes with a promise displaying quite as much ferocity as his antagonists

"But if I live, and that I come home,

I will whet my pike on their orange bones."

But political vengeance is not exhausted in this world: the next is looked forward to for its aggravation. The Celtic race, I imagine, are fond of an appeal to the "courts below:" Rhadamanthus in preference to the Lord Chancellor-coalsack versus woolsack. In one of the Scotch Jacobite songs, the hatred borne to the Duke of Cumberland is thus expressed

"The Deil sat girnin in the neuk

Ryving sticks to roast the Duke."

Mr. Thomas Crofton Croker, in one of his translations of an Irish Keen (Caoine), makes part of the lamentation over the dead run thus:

"The Condons of Cloughlea
That was sold by a piper,

May he caper in hell

To his tune-the false viper!"

Here, the grotesque, so inherent in the Irish character, mingles with the vengeful. But those lines are far surpassed by a verse of an Irish rebel ballad, that concludes thus; and for wild vigour of fancy, and intensity of hatred, I know nothing to match it,

"The tree of Liberty is planted
In the flames of burning hell,
And the fruit that grows upon it
Is the sowls of Orangemen."

And here concludes our section of the specimens of the songs of parties, and I think it will be admitted there was no love lost between them.