A MELOLOGUE

UPON

NATIONAL MUSIC.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THESE verses were written for a Benefit at the Dublin Theatre, and were spoken by Miss Smith, with a degree of success, which they owed solely to her admirable manner of reciting them. I wrote them in haste; and it very rarely happens that poetry, which has cost but little labour to the writer, is productive of any great pleasure to the reader. Under this impression, I certainly should not have published them if they had not found their way into some of the newspapers, with such an addition of errors to their own original stock, that I thought it but fair to limit their responsibility to those faults alone which really belong to them.

With respect to the title which I have invented for this Poem, I feel even more than the scruples of the Emperor Tiberius, when he humbly asked pardon of the Roman Senate for using "the outlandish term, monopoly." But the truth is, having written the Poem with the sole view of serving a Benefit, I thought that an unintelligible word of this kind would not be without its attraction for the multitude, with whom, "If 'tis not sense, at least 'tis Greek." To some of my readers, however, it may not be superfluous to say, that by "Melologue," I mean that mixture of recitation and music, which is frequently adopted in the performance of Collins's Ode on the Passions, and of which the most striking example I can remember is the prophetic speech of Joad in the Athalie of Racine.

T. M.

MELOLOGUE.

A SHORT STRAIN OF MUSIC FROM THE ORCHESTRA.

THERE breathes a language, known and felt
Far as the pure air spreads its living zone;
Wherever rage can rouse, or pity melt,

That language of the soul is felt and known.
From those meridian plains,

Where oft, of old, on some high tower,

The soft Peruvian pour'd his midnight strains, And call'd his distant love with such sweet power, That, when she heard the lonely lay,

Not worlds could keep her from his arms away*,

"A certain Spaniard, one night late, met an Indian woman in the streets of Cozco, and would have taken her to his home, but she cried out, For God's sake, Sir, let me go; for that pipe, which you hear in yonder tower, calls me with great passion, and I cannot refuse the summons; for love constrains me to go, that I may be his wife, and he my husband."" Garcilasso de la Véga, in Sir Paul Rycaut's translation.