the students, not only of the principles but the organisation of the Irish Union*, a solemn Visitation was held by Lord Clare, the vicechancellor of the University, with the view of inquiring into the extent of this branch of the plot, and dealing summarily with those engaged in it.

Imperious and harsh as then seemed the policy of thus setting up a sort of inquisitorial tribunal, armed with the power of examining witnesses on oath, and in a place devoted to the instruction of youth, I cannot but confess that the facts which came out in the course of the evidence went far towards justifying even this arbitrary proceeding; and to the many who, like myself, were acquainted only with the general views of the Union leaders, without even knowing, except from conjecture, who those leaders were, or what their plans or objects, it was most startling to hear the disclosures which every succeeding witness brought forth. There were a few, -and among that number poor Robert Emmet, John Brown, and the two * st, whose total absence from the whole scene, as well as the dead silence that, day after day, followed the calling out of their names, proclaimed how deep had been their share in the unlawful proceedings inquired into by this tribunal.

***

spiracy. In the course of his examination, some questions were put to him which he refused to answer, - most probably from their tendency to involve or inculpate others; and he was accordingly dismissed, with the melancholy certainty that his future prospects in life were blasted; it being already known that the punishment for such contumacy was not merely expulsion from the University, but also exclusion from all the learned professions.

The proceedings, indeed, of this whole day had been such as to send me to my home in the evening with no very agreeable feelings or prospects. I had heard evidence given affecting even the lives of some of those friends whom I had long regarded with admiration as well as affection; and what was still worse than even their danger, -a danger ennobled, I thought, by the cause in which they suffered, — was the shameful spectacle exhibited by those who had appeared in evidence against them. Of these witnesses, the greater number had been themselves involved in the plot, and now came forward either as voluntary informers, or else were driven by the fear of the consequences of refusal to secure their own safety at the expense of companions and friends.

I well remember the gloom, so unusual, that hung over our family circle on that evening, as, talking together of the events of the day, we discussed the likelihood of my being among those who would be called up for examination on the morrow. The deliberate conclusion to which my dear honest advisers came, was that, over

But there was one young friend of mine, *, whose appearance among the suspected and examined as much surprised as it deeply and painfully interested me. He and Emmet had long been intimate and attached friends; their congenial fondness for mathe-whelming as the consequences were to all their matical studies having been, I think, a far more binding sympathy between them than any arising out of their political opinions. From his being called up, however, on this day, when, as it appeared afterwards, all the most important evidence was brought forward, there could be little doubt that, in addition to his intimacy with Emmet, the college authorities must have possessed some information which led them to suspect him of being an accomplice in the con

plans and hopes for me, yet, if the questions leading to criminate others, which had been put to almost all examined on that day, and which poor

alone had refused

to answer, I must, in the same manner, and at all risks, return a similar refusal. I am not quite certain whether I received any intimation, on the following morning, that I was to be one of those examined in the course of the day; but I rather think some such notice had been

In the Report from the Secret Committee of the Irish House of Lords, this extension of the plot to the College is noticed as "a desperate project of the same faction to corrupt the youth of the country by introducing their organised system of treason into the University."

One of these brothers has long been a general in the French army; having taken a part in all those great enter

prises of Napoleon which have now become matter of history. Should these pages meet the eye of General ******, they will call to his mind the days we passed together in Normandy, a few summers since; - more especially our excursion to Bayeux, when, as we talked on the way of old college times and friends, all the eventful and stormy scenes he had passed through since seemed quite forgotten.

↑ For the correctness of the above report of this short examination, I can pretty confidentially answer. It may amuse, therefore, my readers, as showing the manner in which biographers make the most of small facts, to see an extract or two from another account of this affair, published not many years since by an old and zealous friend of our family. After stating with tolerable correctness one or two of my answers, the writer thus proceeds: -"Upon this, Lord Clare repeated the question, and young Moore made such an appeal, as rieties. London, 1836.

often mentioned in this sketch, Edward Hudson.

thee warm and young," which alluded, in its hidden sense, to the Prince Regent's desertion of his political friends. It was little less, I In connexion with another of these matchless own, than profanation to disturb the sentiment airs, one that defies all poetry to do it justice, of so beautiful an air by any connexion with I find the following singular and touching such a subject. The great success of this song, statement in an article of the Quarterly Review. soon after I wrote it, among a large party stay- Speaking of a young and promising poetess, ing at Chatsworth, is thus alluded to in one of Lucretia Davidson, who died very early from Lord Byron's letters to me:- "I have heard nervous excitement, the Reviewer says, "She from London that you have left Chatsworth was particularly sensitive to music. There was and all there full of entusymusy' . one song (it was Moore's Farewell to his Harp) to which she took a special fancy. She wished to hear it only at twilight,-thus (with that same perilous love of excitement which made her place the Eolian harp in the window when she was composing) seeking to increase the effect which the song produced upon a nervous system, already diseasedly susceptible; for it is said that, whenever she heard this song, she became cold, pale, and almost fainting; yet it was her favourite of all songs, and gave occasion to those verses addressed in her fifteenth year to her sister."†

and, in particular, that When first I met thee'
has been quite overwhelming in its effect. I
told you it was one of the best things you ever
wrote, though that dog
wanted you to
omit part of it."

It has been sometimes supposed that "Oh, breathe not his name," was meant to allude to Lord Edward Fitzgerald: but this is a mistake; the song having been suggested by the well known passage in Robert Emmet's dying speech, "Let no man write my epitaph ..... let my tomb remain uninscribed, till other times and other men shall learn to do justice to my memory."

The feeble attempt to commemorate the glory of our great Duke-" When History's Muse," &c.- is in so far remarkable, that it made up amply for its want of poetical spirit, by an outpouring, rarely granted to bards in these days, of the spirit of prophecy. It was in the year 1815 that the following lines first made their appearance : ·

And still the last crown of thy toils is remaining,

The grandest, the purest, ev'n thou hast yet known;
Though proud was thy task, other nations unchaining,
Far prouder to heal the deep wounds of thy own.
At the foot of that throne, for whose weal thou hast stood,
Go, plead for the land that first cradled thy fame, &c.
About fourteen years after these lines were
written, the Duke of Wellington recommended
to the throne the great measure of Catholic
Emancipation.

The fancy of the "Origin of the Irish Harp," was (as I have elsewhere acknowledged) suggested, by a drawing made under peculiarly painful circumstances, by the friend so

"When, in consequence of the compact entered into be tween government and the chief leaders of the conspiracy, the State Prisoners, before proceeding into exile, were allowed to see their friends, I paid a visit to Edward Hudson, in the jail of Kilmainham, where he had then lain immured for four or five months, hearing of friend after friend being led out to death, and expecting every week his own turn to come. I

With the Melody entitled "Love, Valour, and Wit," an incident is connected, which awakened feelings in me of proud, but sad pleasure-as showing that my songs had reached the hearts of some of the descendants of those great Irish families, who found themselves forced, in the dark days of persecution, to seek in other lands a refuge from the shame and ruin of their own ;-those, whose story I have thus associated with one of their country's most characteristic airs:

Ye Blakes and O'Donnells, whose fathers resign'd The green hills of their youth, among strangers to find That repose which at home they had sigh'd for in vain. From a foreign lady, of this ancient extraction, - whose names, could I venture to mention them, would lend to the incident an additional Irish charm,—I received, about two years since, through the hands of a gentleman to whom it had been entrusted, a large portfolio, adorned inside with a beautiful drawing, representing Love, Wit, and Valour, as described in the song. In the border that surrounds the drawing are intro

found that to amuse his solitude he had made a large drawing with charcoal on the wall of his prison, representing that fancied origin of the Irish Harp which, some years after, I adopted as the subject of one of the Melodies.'"'— Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, vol. i.

↑ Quarterly Review, vol. xli. p. 294.

THE FIFTH VOLUME.

"J'espère toutefois que ma sympathie pour l'Irlande vous fera juger ma foible production avec cette heureuse partialité qui impose silence à la critique: car, si je n'appartiens pas à l'Ile In spite of the satirist's assertion, that

Verte par ma naissance, ni mes relations, je puis dire que je m'y intéresse avec un cœur Irlandais, et que j'ai conservé plus que le nom de mes pères. Cela seul me fait espérer que mes petits voyageurs ne subiront pas le triste noviciat des étrangers. Puissent-ils remplir leur mission sur le sol natal, en agissant conjointe- | ment et toujours pour la cause Irlandaise, et amener enfin une ère nouvelle pour cette héroïque et malheureuse nation:-le moyen de vaincre de tels adversaires s'ils ne font qu'un ?

"Vous dirai-je, Monsieur, les doux moments que je dois à vos ouvrages? ce seroit répéter une fois de plus ce que vous entendez tous les jours et de tous les coins de la terre. Aussi j'ai garde de vous ravir un tems trop précieux par l'écho de ces vieilles vérités.

"next to singing, the most foolish thing

Is gravely to harangue on what we sing,"—

I shall yet venture to prefix to this Volume a few introductory pages, not relating so much to the Songs which it contains as to my own thoughts and recollections respecting songwriting in general.

The close alliance known to have existed between poetry and music, during the infancy of both these arts, has sometimes led to the conclusion that they are essentially kindred to each other, and that the true poet ought to be, if not practically, at least in taste and ear, a musician. That such was the case in the early times of ancient Greece, and that her poets then not only set their own verses to music, but sung them at public festivals, there is every reason, from all we know on the subject, to "Si jamais mon étoile me conduit en Irlande, believe. A similar union between the two arts je ne m'y croirai pas étrangère. Je sais que le attended the dawn of modern literature, in the passé y laisse de longs souvenirs, et que la con- twelfth century, and was, in a certain degree, formité des désirs et des espérances rapproche continued down as far as the time of Petrarch, en dépit de l'espace et du tems. when, as it appears from his own memo“Jusque là, recevez, je vous prie, l'assurance randums, that poet used to sing his verses, in

composing them*; and when it was the custom with all writers of sonnets and canzoni to prefix to their poems a sort of key-note, by which the intonation in reciting or chanting them was to be regulated.

sooner had the quaigh taken its round, after our repast, than his friend, Sir Adam, was called upon, with the general acclaim of the whole table, for the song of " Hey tuttie tattie," and gave it out to us with all the As the practice of uniting in one individual, true national relish. But it was during the -whether Bard, Scald, or Troubadour,-the chorus that Scott's delight at this festive scene character and functions both of musician and chiefly showed itself. At the end of every poet, is known to have been invariably the mark verse, the whole company rose from their of a rude state of society, so the gradual separ-seats, and stood round the table with arms ation of these two callings, in accordance with crossed, so as to grasp the hand of the neighthat great principle of Political Economy, the bour on each side. Thus interlinked, we division of labour, has been found an equally continued to keep measure to the strain, by sure index of improving civilisation. So far, moving our arms up and down, all chanting in England, indeed, has this partition of work- forth vociferously, "Hey tuttie tattie, Hey manship been carried, that, with the signal ex- tuttie tattie." Sir Walter's enjoyment of this ception of Milton, there is not to be found, I old Jacobite chorus, -a little increased, doubtbelieve, among all the eminent poets of Eng- less, by seeing how I entered into the spirit land, a single musician. It is but fair, at the of it,-gave to the whole scene, I confess, a same time, to acknowledge, that out of the zest and charm in my eyes such as the finest works of these very poets might be produced musical performance could not have bestowed a select number of songs, surpassing, in fancy, on it. grace, and tenderness, all that the language, perhaps, of any other country could furnish.

We witness, in our own times, -as far as the knowledge or practice of music is concerned, -a similar divorce between the two arts; and my friend and neighbour, Mr. Bowles, is the only distinguished poet of our day whom I can call to mind as being also a musician. † Not to dwell further, however, on living writers, the strong feeling, even to tears, with which I have seen Byron listen to some favourite melody, has been elsewere described by me; and the musical taste of Sir Walter Scott I ought to be the last person to call in question, after the very cordial tribute he has left on record to my own untutored minstrelsy. But I must say, that, pleased as my illustrious friend appeared really to be, when I first sung for him at Abbotsford, it was not till an evening or two after, at his own hospitable supper-table, that I saw him in his true sphere of musical enjoyment. No

The following is a specimen of these memorandums, as given by Foscolo: "I must make these two verses over again, singing them, and I must transpose them-3 o'clock, A. M. 19th October." Frequently to sonnets of that time such notices as the following were prefixed:—“Intonatum per Francum "-" Scriptor dedit sonum.”

The late Rev. William Crowe, author of the noble poem of "Lewisden Hill," was likewise a musician, and has left a Treatise on English versification, to which his knowledge of the sister art lends a peculiar interest.

So little does even the origin of the word "lyrick," as ap

Having been thus led to allude to this visit, I am tempted to mention a few other circumstances connected with it. From Abbotsford I proceeded to Edinburgh, whither Sir Walter, in a few days after, followed; and during my short stay in that city an incident occurred, which, though already mentioned by Scott, in his Diary §, and owing its chief interest to the connexion of his name with it, ought not to be omitted among these memoranda. As I had expressed a desire to visit the Edinburgh theatre, which opened but the evening before my departure, it was proposed to Sir Walter and myself, by our friend Jeffrey, that we should dine with him at an early hour for that purpose, and both were good-natured, enough to accompany me to the theatre. Having found, in a volume|| sent to me by some anonymous correspondent, a more circumstantial account of the scene of that evening than Sir Walter has given in his Diary, I shall here

plied to poetry, seem to be present to the minds of some writers, that the poet, Young, has left us an Essay on Lyric Poetry, in which there is not a single allusion to Music, from beginning to end.

Life by Lockhart, vol. vi. p. 128.

"We went to the theatre together, and the house being luckily a good one, received T. M. with rapture. I could have hugged them, for it paid back the debt of the kind reception I met with in Ireland."

Written by Mr. Benson Hill.