About the literary merits of the editor who has furnished the public with two handsome volumes full of the ballad poetry of sister Ireland, we have little to say. We do not care to use words of disparagement to one who has spread before us a considerable quantity of curious and pleasant reading. But we cannot help the remark that the introductory matter is far too eloquent and discursive for our sombre taste. We could have well spared all those portions of it which are especially devoted to Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, Guarini, Tas soni, Charlemagne and the twelve peers of France, Bernard del Carpio, the Cid, Zimenes, Columbus, the Medici, Averroes, Abencerrage, Ben Zaid, Aristotle, Burke, Ferdusi, Alphonso the Wise, Homer, Charles II., Ben Johnson, Oliver Cromwell, Hippias, Hipparchus, and M'Auley. We are not under any obligation to him for adding to the collections which contain—

"Far in a wild, unknown to public view, From youth to age a reverend hermit grew "

because the author of it is designed as Archdeacon of Clogher; nor for giving us an additional copy of that other "Hermit," who brought his guiltless feast from the mountain's grassy side, although its author, Goldsmith, was one of whose memory Ireland might justly be proud. There are many others which we might exclude, not because they are easily to be found elsewhere, but because there is no great advantage in finding them anywhere. But the collection is large and rich, and we acknowledge with pleasure that it has introduced us into a new field of genius, not deficient in flowers.

But what a sad contrast to the whole spirit of our Scottish minstrelsy. In it, even the most tragic and exciting passages relate to enmities which have long departed. The wrath is appeased-the wounds are healed, and we look back on all through the mellow influence of time and change. It is like the peaceful ivied ruin in the placid sunset. We ask not what bloody scenes it has witnessed-what strong injustice it has protected-what miserable captive sighed in its dungeon; there it

is, calm, majestic, tranquil—an object of the most pleasing interest and gentle enjoyment. But wherever there is action and reality in the Irish ballad, it is sure to bear on feuds and strifes still fresh and rankling. The sores are open; in some instances the very wounds are bloody. The earliest of those pieces which can be legitimately called historical ballads

that is to say, which justify the attribute historical by reference to some event, and justify the name of ballad, by having sprung out of the popular feeling about that event, in distinction from compositions by literary men who have studied the event in books-the oldest historical ballads, in this sense of the term, appear to refer to the unhappy '98. Take, for instance, the "Death-wake of William Orr," written by Dr Drennan. Orr was, it appears, a Presbyterian farmer of Antrim, executed for administering the oath of the United Irishmen to a soldier. Here is a portion of the dirge dedicated to his fate :"Hapless Nation! rent, and torn,

Thou wert early taught to mourn,
Warfare of six hundred years!
Epochs marked with blood and tears!

Hunted through thy native grounds,
Or flung reward to human hounds;
Each one pulled and tore his share,
Heedless of thy deep despair.

Hapless Nation-hapless Land,
Heap of uncementing sand!
Crumbled by a foreign weight;
And by worse-domestic hate.

God of mercy! God of peace!
Make the mad confusion cease;
O'er the mental chaos move,
Through it SPEAK the light of love.

Monstrous and unhappy sight!
Brothers' blood will not unite
Holy oil and holy water

Mix, and fill the world with slaughter."

All this is very sad and very terrible. And there is another and quite peculiar vein of sadness winding through all the ballads that have reality in them-the traces that they carry of the amount of physical destitution borne by the people, and the dire famines that have swept them from time to time. The picture is not vulgarised by the sordid details of simple physical misery, for the Irish have a way with them in these

things, and can endow even starvation and nudity with the moighty genteelness, which is their peculiar gift. We turn, for instance, to the Lament of the Irish Emigrant," by Lady Dufferin. He lacks food and raiment at home, and is going to seek them abroad. We all can summon up in idea what sort of object of poetic interest is an Irishman of the poorer kind in a famine year-a man who has sold the pig-who has exhausted the last argument with the agent who has been at the door of every relief committee-who has perhaps begged on the highway of unwholesome and forbidding aspect-filthy, ragged, and spotted with vermin. But all these vulgar and offensive attributes are washed away by the fountains of refined sorrow which flow full and strong from the

poor man's heart, when he calls up, in the midst of his hardships, the departed form of her who was the partner of his joys and of his sorrows, and now lies in her grave near the stile on which he sits, and thinks about the past and the future. It was there that they sat long ago when they were betrothed. The place is little changed; the lark sings the corn is green-but the voice that then spoke in affection and hope is silenced for ever.

"I'm very lonely now, Mary,

For the poor make no new friends!
But, oh they love the better still
The few our Father sends !
And you were all I had, Mary,

My blessin' and my pride:
There's nothin' left to care for now,
Since my poor Mary died.

Yours was the good, brave heart, Mary,
That still kept hoping on,
When the trust in God had left my soul,
And my arm's young strength was gone;
There was comfort ever on your lip,

And the kind look on your brow-
I bless you, Mary, for that same,
Though you cannot hear me now.

I thank you for the patient smile,
When your heart was fit to break,
When the hunger-pain was gnawin' there,
And you hid it for my sake!
I bless you for the pleasant word,

When your heart was sad and sore-
Oh! I'm thankful you are gone, Mary,
Where grief can't reach you more !”
This is very tender and sweet in
sentiment, and melodious in expres-

sion; but it is not ballad poetry, in the fundamental sense of the term. It is not what the people say for themselves, but what refined genius says for them. The function of making the ballads of a people in this fashion is not that to which Fletcher referred. It may happen that the composition of one high in genius or in rank is adopted by the populace, and passes to their bosoms; as, for instance, Lady Anne Barnard's pathetic ballad of "Auld Robin Gray." But this is a matter of chance; and we suspect that the editors of newspapers, and the readers of curious literature, know a great deal more about these ballads of the Irish than the Irish themselves know. With our Scottish ballads it is far otherwise. Such pathos and sentiment as they contain are not triumphs of literary art they are the throbbing of the national heart itself. And this heart is tender and true, though doubtless it has its capricious, and sometimes its worse than capricious, emotions.

Breaking out of a barbarous age, and echoing freely the sentiments of turbulent times, it is natural that our ballad poetry should not be found to be ever under the regulations of modern refinement and modern ethics. In this, of course, the comparison will be in externals mightily in favour of the Irish muse. We do not deny to that country generally the virtue of purity and decorum in the domestic relations which it so often loudly claims. In a ballad literature, prepared in the name of the country by men of genius and education, it is natural that there should be nothing to even hint offence to the most fastidious reader. The good taste of the editor has, as every one would anticipate, kept the collection of old Scottish ballads as free from any impurity as the modern Irish ballads have been made by their authors. But of course popular compositions springing out of the social conditions of their age, of necessity speak, although they need not speak coarsely, of the sort of acts that were done in their day, and it is a somewhat hard test to measure them by the ways of acting and thinking which belong

to a different period. The Scottish ballads are the utterance of Scottish society, high and low, at periods far earlier than the reign of Queen Mary; and yet, as all the world knows, it would be a desperate affair to judge of the people frequenting Queen Mary's court, and of their conduct, by the criterion of the court of Queen Victoria. There is no denying it, that along with the great deeds of our ancestors great crimes were not unknown. Accordingly, the ballads, taking the tone of the surrounding social conditions, are not only tragic, but often criminally tragic. To give zest to the dramatic narrative of a rude age, and to bring out the magnanimity of the hero of the tale, a crime and a criminal are almost necessary. Are we yet far enough advanced in civilisation to be above this necessity? Tragic enough certainly are the plot and incidents of the Scottish balladsdesperately wicked sometimes the perpetrators, male or female. But still, through the histories of their misdeeds, the narrative conveys in some shape-whether that of an avenging Providence or the milder medium of some great man's judgment-a commendation of honour, truth, fidelity, and all those virtues which are the best that men can exercise towards each other. Brightening also, through narratives of falsehood and cruelty, we find those warm and strong domestic affections which have given such an honest glow to the later minstrelsy, and especially to the popular songs of the country. So it is that we have in the well-known lament of "Waly, Waly," and in that other ballad, which is sometimes considered a continuation of it, but is by Professor Aytoun deemed a separate composition, those deeply pathetic wailings in which the injured wife's sense of wrong and misery struggle with her affecton, and give way before its intensity and unwavering constancy. Hence, too, the constancy and faith of poor Burd Helen, which lighten her path through every form of misery and hardship, and that undying love which draws May Margaret to follow her dead lover's spectre to his tomb, crying

"Is there any room at your head, Saunders?
Is there any room at your feet?
Or any room at your side, Saunders,
Where fain fain I wad sleep."

The many narratives of ferocity and strife which these ballads contain, are often broken in upon by such gentle lights. Take, for instance, one not very extensively known, "Edom o' Gordon." It commemorates one of those terrible acts of feudal violence which crowd the chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not in Scotland only. The Laird of Towie-the same domain whence the Russian general Barclay de Tolly took his title is absent from home, and his feudal enemy, Gordon of Auchindown, comes to besiege the castle. The lady defends it with spirit

"But reach my pistol, Glaud, my man,

And charge ye weel my gun;
For, but if I pierce that bludy butcher,
We a' shall be undone."

She stude upon the castle wa',

And let twa bullets flee;
She miss'd that bludy butcher's heart,
And only razed his knee."

Fire is applied; it penetrates quickly through all parts of the narrow peel-house, and reaches the poor children, whose fate, with that of their mother, is described in these pathetic terms:—

"O then bespake her youngest son,
Sat on the nourice' knee;
Says, Mother dear, gie owre this house,

For the reek it smothers me.'

'I wad gie a' my gowd, my bairn, Sae wad I a' my fee,

For ae blast o' the westlin' wind,

To blaw the reek frae thee!'

O then bespake her daughter dear— She was baith jimp and sma''O row me in a pair o' sheets,

And tow me owre the wa'.'

They row'd her in a pair o' sheets, But on the point o' Gordon's spear

And tow'd her owre the wa';

She gat a deadly fa'.

O bonnie, bonnie was her mouth,
And cherry were her cheeks;
And clear, clear was her yellow hair,
Whereon the red blude dreeps.

Then wi' his spear he turn'd her owre,

O gin her face was wan!
He said, 'You are the first that e'er
I wish'd alive again.'

He turn'd her owre and owre again,

O gin her skin was white!

I might hae spared that bonnie face,
To hae been some man's delight.

'Busk and boun, my merrie-men a',
For ill dooms I do guess;
I canna look on that bonnie face,
As it lies on the grass!'

Wha looks to freits, my master deir,
It's freits will follow them;

Let it ne'er be said that Edom o' Gordon
Was dauntit by a dame.'

But when the lady saw the fire

Come flaming owre her head, She wept, and kiss'd her children twain, Says, 'Bairns, we been but dead.'"

Their wit is a remarkable feature of the Scottish ballads as well as their pathos. It is sharp, keen, and ever tells home to practical conclusions. Of this kind the "Wife of Auchtermuchty" is a very perfect specimen. It is wonderful how a composition so full of genius, and so dexterously handled, should have come down to us without any claimant to its authorship. Perhaps we must attribute this to the modesty of some feminine composer, who, having executed so noble a vindication of the privileges of her sex, left it to carry its own weight without the encumbrance of a name. Its aim is to raise the dignity of the true housewife and her functions. The small farmer or crofter, returning home after his hard day's work in wind and rain, finds his wife bien and comfortable. He thinks she has been thus all day without having anything material to do, and so he reproaches the inequality in their lots. It is resolved that there shall be a more equal division of duties and privileges, and he takes his first day of housekeeping. The calamities and difficulties which come upon him one after another in untiring procession, and with accumulating complexity, are to be compared only to those inextricable dreams begotten of sausage and Welsh rabbit, in which the hapless sleeper, with a horrible consciousness that he has nothing on but what he went to bed in, is required, on some occasion of public solemnity, to perform impossible functions, and finds himself gradually

buried under an inextricable mass of ravelled operations. And yet the

whole is described to the external world with the clear precision of an Ostade or a Teniers; and nothing can be more naturally true and picturesque than every little turn and incident-as, for instance, where the conduct of the sow who discovers the milk kirning to be made into cheese, and proceeds stealthily to appropriate it, not with an entirely easy mind, is thus told,—

Ay she winket, and ay she drank." It is singular that Ireland, with such an abundant ready - money currency of wit in the daily intercourse of her people, should have none stored up in reserve for literature. If we had any such echo of the tone and tenor of common life among them as the Scottish ballads are to our own country, we could not well have been without a sprinkling of this element.

Sister Ireland is an adept at fairy legend. The lithe little ephemeral creatures who people the elfin world seem to be adapted to the exuberant and rather airy and unsubstantial habits of thought of that light-hearted people. But they can give a tragic sadness to the doings of the fantastic elves and indeed, throughout the Irish minstrelsy, notwithstanding the elasticity of the Irish character, there is far more of sadness and inert sorrow than either of gladness or of healthy exertion. The

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'Fairy Thorn," an Ulster ballad, is one of the tragic class. Some young maidens in their glee have gone up to dance and amuse themselves on fairy ground. One of their number is doomed to be stolen into the spirit world, and the poet describes, with a

chilling awfulness, the spell that binds them to the ground, and drags one of them away :

"And sinking one by one, like lark-notes When the falcon's shadow saileth across from the sky

the open shaw,

Are hush'd the maiden's voices, as cowering down they lie In the flutter of their sudden awe.

For, from the air above, and the grassy ground beneath,

And from the mountain-ashes and the

A

old whitethorn between,

power of faint enchantment doth through

their beings breathe,

And they sink down together on the green.

They sink together silent, and stealing side to side,

They fling their lovely arms o'er their drooping necks so fair,

Then vainly strive again their naked arms to hide,

For their shrinking necks again are bare.

Thus clasp'd and prostrate all, with their

heads together bow'd,

Soft o'er their bosoms beating-the only human sound

They hear the silky footsteps of the silent fairy crowd,

Like a river in the air, gliding round.

Nor scream can any raise, nor prayer can

any say,

But wild, wild, the terror of the speechless three

For they feel fair Anna Grace drawn silently away,

By whom they dare not look to see. They feel their tresses twine with her parting locks of gold,

And the curls elastic falling, as her head withdraws;

They feel her sliding arms from their tranced arms unfold,

But they dare not look to see the cause.

For heavy on their senses the faint enchantment lies

Through all that night of anguish and perilous amaze; And neither fear nor wonder can ope their quivering eyes,

Or their limbs from the cold ground raise."

But the supernatural, like all the other departments of what is termed the ballad poetry of the Irish, partakes of the character of artificiality. They afford us clever poems, translations, imitations, adaptations of popular superstitions and legends-they do not give us, what that valuable gem the genuine ballad is, the shape in which the people have put their own legends. It may be all the more honourable to the modern bards of Ireland that they have made a respectable minstrelsy for a people who had none of their own; but the productions of their ingenious pens, brilliant though they may be, cannot possess the intrinsic value of a popular rhythmic literature which is the growth of centuries. It is speaking well, and not evil, of these able men to say that they have studied our ballads, and in some measure imitated their tone and rhythm. For instance, as we are in the fairy or supernatural department at present, we call the reader's attention to the

strange wild ballad of Binnorie, where the fair-haired damsel is drowned by her elder sister, and a harper strings his harp with the dead girl's hair :

"He has ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair,

Binnorie, O Binnorie;

And wi' them strung his harp sae rare,

By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie. He brought the harp to her father's hall; Binnorie, O Binnorie;

And there was the court assembled all;
By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie.
He set the harp upon a stane,

Binnorie, O Binnorie;

And it began to play alane,

By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie."

One of the cleverest of the Irish fairy ballads, "Sir Turlough, or the Churchyard Bride," by William Carlton, begins thus, and follows on throughout with the same refrain—

"The bride she bound her golden hair

Killeevy, O Killeevy!

And her step was light as the breezy air When it bends the morning flowers so fair, By the bonnie green woods of Killeevy."

The actual superstitions which have lived among men are the raw material out of which men of genius are enabled to construct the poetry of the supernatural. The most powerful imagination is limited to that which has been believed, however much it may range into that which is in itself impossible. Without this condition the poetry of the supernatural would cease to be poetry, because it would cease to appeal to anything capable of stirring the human heart. All great artists dealing in the supernatural, if they did not believe in it themselves, have studied profoundly the communications of those who did, for the purpose of giving life to their narratives. It is one of the qualities of our purely traditional ballads that they are still a living fountain of the supernatural. It must be of infinite value to all writers of the imaginative, so long as our language lasts, to possess, permanently embodied in print, those rhythmic legends which long lived among the people, not so much in the shape of a literature made for and taught to them, as of the embodiment of the things passing in their