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Unbless'd, leading its followers to the gulf
of utter desolation.

Tell. He who looks

Around him cheerly, with unclouded eye,
Trusting in God and in his active strength,
Easily rids himself of need and danger.

The mountains daunt not who were born upon them.

After a few more sententious observations, for our readers will have noticed that William Tell is somewhat apophthegmatical in his ordinary conversation, he declares his intention of going to Altdorf, to visit his father-in-law, Walter Furst. Hedwige entreats him to absent himself from Altdorf, until the governor, who especially hates him, shall have left it; or at least, if he will go, not to take his cross-bow with him. He answers

My right hand's lamed when I'm without my bow;

And farther urges that the governor will let him alone, because—

It is not long ago

That my chase led me through the savage valley

Down which the Schachen pours its torrents, where

No trace of man appears. There, as I trod

My solitary path, along a track,

Whence 'twas impossible to turn aside,-
For steep above me rose a wall of rock,

And underneath fiercely the Schachen roar'd,—
Sudden the Governor appear'd before me.
He was alone, as I was; there we stood,
Man against man, and close beside th' abyss.—
When first the noble gentleman beheld me,
And knew 'twas I, whom, for a trifling fault,
He had so lately mulcted heavily,

And saw me striding, with my good cross-bow,
Hastily tow'rds him, he turn'd pale as death;
His knees denied their service, and I thought
He would have fallen 'gainst the mountain side.
Then I felt pity for him, and approach'd,
With a respectful air, saying, 'Tis I,
Lord Governor. He could not force a sound
From out his lips, but dumbly, with his hand,
He motion'd me that I should go my ways.
I left him, and dispatch'd his train to help him.

Hedwige. He trembled at thy sight?-Alas! Alas!
Thou saw'st his weakness;-that he'll ne'er forgive.

Notwithstanding this judicious remark of Hedwige, who certainly discovers more knowledge of human nature than her husband, Tell persists in going to Altdorf, and takes, not only his cross-bow, but likewise his eldest son Walter, with him.

The next scene is between Ulrich of Rudeny, and Bertha of Bruneck. He declares his love; the lady scorns his passion, upbraiding him with his degeneracy, in deserting the cause of his country, and wearing the gilt shackles of Austria. He tells Bertha, as his old uncle had previously told him, that it was only in the hope of obtaining her hand that he submitted to Austria; and she answers, equally confirming Baron Attinghausen's conjectures, that her property excites too much cupidity, to allow of her hand being bestowed upon him. The young beauty's exhortations prove more efficacious than the greyheaded nobleman's, and Rudeny becomes an ardent patriot. There is much ability shown in this scene, as indeed there is in everything Schiller has written; but we must acknowledge, that, in a drama of this description, a love affair between persons neither connected with the main business of the

play, the confederation at Rutli, nor, like William Tell, rendered by circumstances the principal instrument of effecting the liberation there plotted, appears to us wholly out of its place, and rather more à la Française, than we should have expected from a real German poet.

We now come to the grand, apple-shooting scene. But our extracts from this tragedy have already extended to such a length, and so many passages of superior interest remain behind, that we must reserve Gessler's act of capricious tyranny, and its consequences to the tortured father, for our next number.

ODOHERTY ON IRISH SONGS.

THERE is, I perceive, a disinclination becoming very visible on the part of the English, to believe us Irish people, when we tell them that they know nothing about us. They look upon it as a sort of affront, and yet nothing is more true. And as example is much better than any theory, I shall just beg leave to prove my assertion, by that they put into our mouths when they think fit to write

as Irish.

The first book I lay my hand on will do. It is a collection of Irish songs, published in London, without date, printed by Oliver and Boyd. It contains all the popular Irish songs which you hear sung at the theatres, public-houses, Vauxhall, and other such fashionable places of resort. There are ninety of them in all, and I shall patiently examine these specimens of Irish wit-these would-be flowers of the Hibernian Parnassus.

The first song is a great favourite. The Sprig of Shillelah, and it is not much amiss. It contains an immensity of blarney to us, which, of course, is palatable. I suspect the author of never having been in Ireland, nevertheless, from these lines:

"Who has e'er had the luck to see Donnybrook fair,

An Irishman all in his glory is there ;" for I have had the "luck" to see that fair, and I never could see any glory in it. It is a paltry thing, if compared with Bartholomew fair, or any of the great fairs of London; and like them is a nuisance which gathers the blackguard men and women of a metropolis, to indulge in all kinds of filth. I should call it the worst specimen of Ireland. Would a Scotchman think his national character would be favourably exhibited by a collection of the cadies and baker-boys, and gutterbloods of Edinburgh, with

their trulls? And as Dublin is three times the size of Edinburgh, the sweepings of its streets must be three times as disgusting. The squalid misery, too, which is mixed up with the drunken riot of the fairs of Donnybrook, has always been quite revolting to my eyes, and I should rather see the magistracy of Dublin employed in suppressing it, than hear silly song-writers using their rhymes in its panegyric.

The next is Paddy MacShane's Seven ages; a stupid parody on Shakespeare. A great knowledge of Ireland is shewn here. Mr MacShane, it appears, was a native of Ballyporeen, and fell in love with a lady there

-but

"She asked me just once that to see her I'd come,

When I found her ten children and husband at home,

A great big whacking chairman of Ballyporeen !"

Now Ballyporeen, Heaven bless it, is a dirty village, of about fifty houses, at the foot of the Kilworth mountains, as you enter Tipperary, on the mail-coach road from Cork to Dublin. When I passed through it last, the only decent-looking house I saw there was the inn; and a poor one enough even that was. I leave it to yourself to judge what a profitable trade that of a chairman would be in such a place as that; or how probable it is that a woman with a husband and ten

children could pass off, incog., as unmarried, upon a native. You would walk from one end to the other of it in three minutes.

Again he tells us that

"I turned servant, and lived with the great justice Pat,

A big dealer in p'ratoes at Ballyporeen, With turtle and venison he lined his in

side,

Ate so many fat capons," &c.

Potatoes are somewhere about the price of three half-pence a-stone in Ballyporeen, and they are cultivated by almost every one in it; so that this excellent justice had a fine merchandize of it. As for turtle, I imagine that the name of it was never heard of in the village; indeed, as Tipperary is quite an inland county, it must be a rarity to every part of itand capons! I am quite sure the dish is unknown altogether. The bard shews great knowledge of the Irish magistracy, even by the way he mentions his justice-Justice Pat!

We have then,

"There was an Irish lad-Who loved a cloistered nun."

A good song, and perhaps Irish. One verse is like the idiom. When the hero could not get at his mistress, "He stamped and raved, and sighed and prayed,

And many times he swore, The devil burn the iron bolts! The devil burn the door!" Then follows,

"Mulrooney's my name, I'm a comical boy,

A tight little lad at Shillelah,

St Patrick wid whisky he suckled me, joy,

Among the sweet bogs of Killalah." I must protest that I never heard the word " joy" so used in Ireland by anybody, and yet it is a standing expression put into our mouths by every writer of Irish characters. Of the existence of Killalah, I am ignorant. We have Killalah in Connaught, but it rhymes to tallow. But apropos of rhymes, listen to those put into Mr Mulrooney's mouth,

“But thinks I, spite of what fame and glory bequeath,

How conceited I'd look in a fine laurel wreath,

Wid my hand in my mouth, to stand

picking my teeth."

I flatter myself that the "comical boy" would say bequaith and wraith, rhyming to faith, and never think of screwing up his mouth to squeezing these into bequeeth and wreeth.

Of Dermot and Sheelah, I shall only quote the chorus,

"Beam, bum, boodle, loodle, loodle,

Beam, bum, boodle, loodle, loo." Pretty writing that-and very much on a par, in point of sense and interest, with Barry Cornwall's humbugs to Appollor-rather more musical I own. But is it Irish? Negatur. I deny it VOL. XVII.

poz! Boodles! why, Boodles is a club of good hum-drum gentlemen, kept by Cuddington and Fuller, at 31, St James Street; but not particularly Hibernian. A chorus in the same taste concerning them, would run thus,

"Bow, wow, boodle, noodle, doodle,

Bow, wow, boodle, noodle, pooh!" Close following comes Paddy O'Blarney, a misnomer on the face of it. Blarney is a village and baronial castle. You might as well say, Sawney M'Linlithgow, or Archy O'Goosedubs. The song is a brutal attempt at wit, and mock-Irish, ex. gr.

"I found one who larnt grown-up Jolmen to write,

Just to finish gay Paddy O'Blarney." Jolmen! what's that? Put for jontlemen, I suppose. This fellow had a fresh idea of the tongue. Such a word never was heard among us. By the way, our plebeians generally say, jintlemen, though the folks who write for us think otherwise.

Hear the next bard,

"I'm a comical fellow."En passant, I may remark that I never heard any one say he was a comical fellow, that he did not prove an ass, and the rule holds here,

"I'm a comical fellow, I tell you no fib, And I come from the bogs of Killaley;" a various reading, I suppose, of the celebrated unknown district, commemorated in another song, by the name of

Killalah.

"You see I'm the thing by the cut of my jib,

And they christen'd me Teddy O'Reilly."

Observe the name O'Reilly rhymes plainly to "highly." Ask for O'Raly anywhere, and you will not be understood.

But the Christian name is equally destructive to its Irish pretensions. Teddy! a Cockney vulgarism for Edward, and that too confined to the raff of Cockaigne. Thady is a common Irish name, which, as you know, is the abbreviation of Thaddeus, the name of one of the apostles, according to Saints Matthew and Mark, but Teddy is unheard of. Yet it occurs in half a dozen songs of this volume.

us.

What part of the world the next song comes from, needs no ghost to tell One rhyme will denote it. "As the board they put out was too narrow to quarter, The first step I took I was in such a totler." 2 T

It is, you see, marked with the indelible damned Cockney blot, and, in all probability, proceeds from the pen of Leigh Hunt. An Irishman who sounds the R as fiercely as ever that canine letter rung from human organ, could never have been guilty of it. Cushlamachree, which succeeds, is, 'tis said, from the pen of Curran, and the first verse is, think, a good and

warm one.

"Dear Erin, how sweetly thy green bosom rises,

An emerald set in the ring of the sea; Each blade of thy meadows my faithful heart prizes,

Thou Queen of the West-the world's Cushlamachree."

We soon come to a strain of another mood in Sheelah's Wedding, which, for magnificent ignorance of the country in which the scene is laid, is just as good as can be conceived. I extract the whole second verse as a sample of various beauties.

"Well, the time being settled, to church they were carried,

With some more lads and lasses, to see the pair married,

Who vowed that too long from the parson they tarried;

For who should such sweet things be scorning?

Then at church, arrah, yes, you may fancy

them there;

Sure the priest tied them fast, you may very well swear;

And when it was done,
Och, what laughing and fun
Took place about something, and throw-
ing the stocking,

While the blythe boys and GIRLS
Talked of ringing the BELLS

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On St Patrick's day in the morning." The rhyme here marks this brute to be a bestial Cockney. The mixture of the words "parson" and "priest convicts him of not knowing Irish phraseology, which restricts the latter word to the Roman Catholic clergy, who are not parsons. By the name, Sheelah, the lady is decidedly Catholic-and then how consistently we have the talk about the "church" and the "bells!" Roman Catholic places of worship all through Ireland are called chapels, and they have no bells, very few having even one. And the morning marriage! there the ape, if he knew anything of Ireland, must have known that Catholic marriages there are celebrated in the evening. I have been at some hundreds of them.

In the next song, and several others, we have "taef" for "thief," which is enough. The vulgarism inter Hibernos, is "teef." In the next we have the adventures of a certain Mr Teddy, of whom I have already disposed. I may pass Mr Grimgruffenhoff, and Bumper Squire Jones, for different reasons. The latter is a capital song indeed, and written by an Irish Baron of Exchequer. The breed of such judges is not extinct, while we have Lord Norbury, whom God pre

serve.

Mr O'Gallagher falls in love in the next song with a lady named Cicely,

what part of Ireland he found her in is not mentioned. It never was my lot to meet with one of her name and the same remark I must extend to the heroine of the following chaunt

the celebrated Looney Mactwolter's mistress, Miss Judy O'Flannikin,— who is evidently transmuted from O'Flannegan, to rhyme the opening line,

"Oh! whack, Cupid's a Mannikin.” Looney itself is a dubious Christian name. I have known plebeians of that surname, and when they rise in society, if they ever do, they change it always to Loane.

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next-Psha! the name will not pass Murphy O'Casey,"-heads the muster. You might as well say Blackwood O'Jeffrey. Nor can I panegyrize in an another song Father O'Rook, for an Irishman would certainly call him O'Rourke.

I skip a parcel of mere vulgarity to give you

"I'm Larry O'Lashem, was born in Killarney,"

one of whose adventures is described in the following dialect:

"I amused myself laughing, to see how the HINDER

Wheels after the fore ones most furious

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A poet farther on, treats us to the following description of a Kerryman: "His hair was so red, and his eyes were so bright."

No doubt there are red-haired Kerrymen, but they are not one in fifty. The complexion is dark olive, and the hair black, they being in all probability descended from the Spaniards. The poet was thinking of a Highlander. Now the knights of Kerry wear breeches, and are in a small degree civilized.

Another Irishman from Cockneyshire, sings of

-Cormac O'Con,

Of the great Con grandsire,

"Though all taxes I paid, yet no vote I

could pass O.

and was in consequence, though "With principles pure, patriotic, and firm, Attach'd to my country, a friend to reform,"

obliged to fly. His case was certainly hard in not having a vote, when every farmer or labourer in Ireland may have one if he likes, or rather if his landlord likes. In the county of Cork there are 25,000 voters, in Down about 20,000, and so on; so that this grievance about the want of suffrage is rather singular.

There is no use in bothering the public with any more remarks on such a subject. I hope nobody will think I have any spleen against this collection of

songs, which is just as good as any other similar one, but I wished to shew that I had some ground for saying, that we are not quite wrong in accusing our English friends of ignorance

of our concerns. Some time or other, perhaps, I may in the same way get through the usual stage characters, in

ly remote from truth.

With the son of Combal the Greek sire, which we figure and prove them equal-
Whose name sounded afar,
As great Ossian's papa."

If I met this fellow, who has our Irish names so glib at his fingers' ends, at the top of the highest house of the city, I should kick him down stairs. A Ludgate-Hill pawnbroker could not be more impertinent, if he wrote of the fine arts.

In the same de haut en bas fashion should I kick him who informs us that

" I were astonish'd as much as e'er man was,

To see a sea-fight on an ocean of canvass."

You hear the barbarian saying canvass-I long to pull his nose.

I apprehend the author of the Irish Wedding (see Jon Bee) is a Scot. "First, book in hand, came Father Quipes."

What part of the world does that name belong to ?

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It would, perhaps, be a good thing to go over some of the political speculations on Ireland in the same manner, but I never liked Irish politics, and now I particularly detest them. I frequently admire the intrepidity of the heads which John Black spins out for the edification of the Whigamores, whenever he takes us in his hand. Evidently wishing to patronize us, he nevertheless treats us as mere barbarians. I remember reading one morning in the Chronicle, that, except Dublin and Cork, there were no large towns in Ireland, which accounts for its want of civilization, while Scotland was indebted for her superiority over us, to her possessing such eminent cities as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paisley, Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness, and some others which I forget. Now Limerick is larger and more populous than any except the first two; Waterford, Galway, Kilkenny, and Belfast, fall little short of them; and, taking out the first half dozen of Scotch towns, you would seek in vain through Scotland for towns to compare with Drogheda, Sligo, Carlow, Clonmell, Derry, Youghall, and several others. This is but a small sample of his ac

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