which scarcely needs any aid from the art of the composer to shape them into music. Cowley did not excel in song writing. Nature had not endowed him with a fine ear, and, like Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott in our own day, he could not readily distinguish one tune from another, consequently his verse was monotonous, if not harsh and rugged. His most noted composition, one that is still sung by boon companions, and at places where young men drink more than they think, is a paraphrase of Anacreon -a Bacchanalian song, suited to the tastes of a Bacchanalian age, and not consistent with modern ideas, except in so far as we may admire the ingenious perversity which presses all nature into the service of inebriation:

The thirsty earth drinks up the rain,
And thirsts and gapes for drink again.
The sea itself (which, one would think,
Should have but little need of drink)
Drinks twice ten thousand rivers up,
So full that they o'erflow the cup.
The busy sun (and one would guess
By 's drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the sea; and when he's done
The moon and stars drink up the sun.
Fill up the bowl then, fill it high!
Fill all the glasses up, for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, man of morals, tell me why?

Dryden's songs were better adapted to music than Cowley's; but, for the most part, they were even less adapted to decent society, and have long since perished from memory, no more to be revived. One or two of them that were of a patriotic character have been preserved, such as "Come if you dare!" His "Alexander's Feast," a fine composition set to fine music, was not a song, but a small opera.

But Dryden belongs to the bad period of the Restoration - - a period in which courtiers and public men thought it their duty, as well as their pleasure, to imitate

the vices of the court of Charles the Second, when every moral sentiment was deadened or debauched; when hospital ity degenerated into boisterous and degrading intemperance; when virtue was a jest, and honor, so jealously guarded by the sword and pistol of the duellist, was held to be a thing quite apart from good. ness; and when the only manly virtue that was recognized at all was personal courage. This age was very prolific of bad verse. Poetry was supposed to be something artificial, and not natural, and the consequence was that poetry disappeared, and mere idle rhyme took its

What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows

The difference there is betwixt Nature and Art;

I court others in verse, but I love thee in prose, And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.

How was it possible that poetry could flourish when a poet, even of the second rank, could write thus? One of the few songs worth preserving which date from this time is entitled "When this old cap was new," published anonymously in 1666. It throws some light on the manners of the day, and on the antiquity of the great and truly British art of grumbling. If the chancellor of the exchequer could but get Parliament to agree to a grumbling-tax, and allow no one, male or female, to grumble unless they took out a license, what a revenue he might raise! Good hospitality was cherished then of many, Now poor men starve and die, and are not helped by any;

For Charity waxeth cold, and Love is found

in few ;

and the song-writers, deriving their inspiration not at first hand from nature, but at second hand from the Greek and Latin writers whom they imitated or parodied, made every lover a shepherd, in a court dress with gold buttons, shoes with silver buckles, a curly wig à la Louis Quatorze. Lovers in those days had no such honest names as John or Thomas or Edward or Charles, but were all Strephons, or Adonises. Every lass was an Arcadian shepherdess with silk stockings and spangled robe as short as that of a balletdancer; and she, too, instead of being called Jane, Mary, Ellen, or Margaret, was Chloe, Phoebe, Lesbia, or Sophronisba. To judge of the English by their popular songs at this period, they might have been ranked as a nation of Greek or Roman pagans. There was no such thing as love in literature; but, instead of it, "Cupid" was continually shooting his "darts," rhyming them with, as well as aiming them at, "hearts." The word "marriage" was never mentioned; but the happy pair, as Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Jeames Yellowplush sometimes say in our day, went to the "altar of Hymen." A breeze was not a breeze but a zephyr; the storm was Boreas, the sun was Sol or Phœbus, and the moon was Cynthia, Diana, or Luna. Every pretty girl, if not a shepherdess in very short petticoats, was a Venus if she were kind, and a Diana if she were coy. Bacchus - -a vulgar hybrid, half Silenus, half Sir John Falstaff - was the god of drunkenness, to whom continual appeals were made to drown care in a wine-butt or a bowl. Of the kind of song that was most in favor at this time, the following, by Henry Carey, author of "Sally in our Alley," will afford a favorable or, more correctly speaking, an unfavorable specimen :

Bacchus must now his power resign-
I am the only god of wine.

It is not fit the wretch should be

In competition set with me,

Who can drink ten times more than he !

Make a new world, ye powers divine,
Stock it with nothing else but wine;
Let wine its only product be;

Let wine be earth, and air, and sea, and, most drunken, most selfish rhymer! if be meant what he sang

And let that wine be all for me!

Carey was an excellent musician but a very inferior poet. He composed the music to his own songs, and was one of the first in modern days to revive the ancient

practice. The world owes to him the music of more than a hundred songs music that has for the most part been divorced from the service of the stage and concert room to that of religion, and is attuned to pious hymns and psalms_in half of the churches and chapels of England and America. It is not known with certainty who wrote the noble music or the words of" God Save the King," but the balance of proof inclines in favor of Carey. Nothing is more difficult than to fix the age or the authorships of songs and ballads published anonymously. Even the production of the first printed copy with an authentic date is not always suffi cient to set at rest such doubtful points. This test is unfortunately wanting in most inquiries of the kind, and even when applied is not always adequate to the appar ently simple task of giving an author his own property. So difficult is it even in our own day to establish a poet's claim to a song which has happened from any accident to become popular, that when Thomas Moore was accused in jest by Father Prout of translating or stealing the whole of his Irish melodies from Greek and Latin, French, German, and Italian, the world took the good-natured hoax as a serious accusation, and believed that there was but too much truth in it. Thomas Campbell was declared to have stolen "The Exile of Erin " from an Irish hedge-schoolmaster whose name no one ever heard before or since. The Rev. Mr. Wolfe, the author of the noble ode on the burial of Sir John Moore, was in like manner declared to be an impudent plagiarist. One set of wise men declared that he purloined the ode from a lady, while another declared that he stole it from a briefless Irish barrister, who, however, made no claim to it, or on whose behalf no appeal was made during his lifetime. But if such be the case with a modern composition, when the proofs are so abundant and so easily accessible, we need scarcely wonder that it is sometimes difficult to fix the authorship of songs and poems published without a name more than a century ago. This has been eminently the case with the English national anthem, the most renowned song ever written, the most fervent expression of British loyalty, a song that touches a chord in every British heart, and makes it vibrate not only with personal attachment to the sovereign, whether that sovereign be a king as in old times or a beloved queen, the model and example of womanhood, wifehood, and motherhood, as in

our happier day, but which expresses a patriotic devotion to that mild, equable, well-considered, and venerable constitution, of which the crown is the symbol rather than the agent. The sovereigns of England know not the name of the man who wrote this hymn of loyalty; the people are equally ignorant. One set of musical antiquaries claim the music for Dr. John Bull in the reign of James the First, but give no parentage to the poetry. Another set claim both words and music for Henry Carey, who wrote in the reigns of William the Third, Anne, and George the First. Carey was both musician and poet; his music excellent, his poetry indifferent. This description well applies to the national anthem. The music is grand and simple, and capable of being elevated into sublimity; but the poetry, or the verse, is tame and weak; the rhymes

Carey lived a life of poverty and neg. lect. The suspicion of disloyalty clung to him. He was thought to have written a treasonable song that song which, by a strange turn in the wheel of fortune, has since become the very watchword of truth and loyalty. He thus failed to acquire the favor of those who could have befriended him, and at the age of eighty-six, weary of the world, sick at heart, hopeless, destitute, and reduced literally to his last penny, he committed suicide in a miserable garret. Carey's great anthem treasonable though it seemed in his own day was loyally meant. It was loyal to a principle; it was loyal to misfortune; and by the happy accident of its adoption by the house of Hanover it has become the embodiment of a still greater and better-founded loyalty than its author intended a more valuable possession to the throne of Great Britain than all the jewels in the royal tiara or the great Kohi-noor itself.

-

Among the song-writers of this and the preceding age is Thomas or "Tom" Dur. fey, with whom King Charles the Second once condescended to walk though St. James's Park, arm-in-arm, his dogs and courtiers following behind. Durfey wrote five or six volumes of songs, none above mediocrity, and some far below it. Gay, the author of "The Beggar's Opera,' wrote many new songs to the excellent old tunes of England, but scarcely succeeded in making the new songs more moral or less vulgar than the old, or left one great or noble sentiment on record in this form of composition, except in "Black-eyed Susan," one of the most popular songs in the English language. Shortly after his time appeared David Garrick, who wrote that vigorous sea-song which in his time was enough to transform every sailor who heard it before going into battle into a hero:

Hearts of oak are our ships,
Hearts of oak are our men.

In the same period of literary history must be placed James Thomson, author of "The Seasons," who wrote the national anthem "Rule Britannia," a composition which had the good fortune to be associated with the music of Dr. Arne, and to be floated upon that full tide into a surer haven of immortality than it could ever have reached by its own unaided merits. Still later appeared Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, the editor of Percy's "Reliques," and who wrote one song, "O Nanny, wilt thou go with me?" which received from the pen of no less a person than Robert Burns the praise of being the finest composition of its kind in the whole compass of literature.

But it was not until the bright particu lar star of Charles Dibdin arose, towards the close of the last century, that England recognized her greatest national songster. The ideas of some writers are of the earth, earthy. The ideas of honest Dibdin, musician and poet, were of the salt sea, salty; of the ocean, oceanic; of Great Britain, truly British. England loves her sailors; she admires their free-heartedness, their outspoken honesty, their contempt of diffi culty and danger, their rollickings, their roystering good-humor, their superexuberant fun, their sublime courage; and so dearly loves them that the offence against good manners and propriety which she would severely condemn in any other, she condones or excuses in the sailor. The soldier, though highly esteemed in his own way, is not the prime favorite of the

English people, among whom he cast his lot at an early period of his career. He wrote many excellent songs, full of the peculiar tenderness and humor which are so often found in combination in the Irish character, which promise to enjoy a longer tenure of popular favor than the songs of his more classical predecessor, Thomas Moore. Except in the songs that breathed incipient sympathy with Irish disaffection and rebellion, Moore was far more English than Irish, and scarcely attempted to reach the popular heart, or, if he did so, failed in the endeavor. He was essentially an aristocrat, and might have been compared to a tame canary-bird who never sang well except when he was perched on the finger of a countess; unlike Samuel Lover and Robert Burns, who sang aloft in the sky with the sunlight upon their wings, and cheered the hearts of the common people in the fields below.

Most English poets worthy of the name have written songs often very beautiful to read, but not always well adapted to be sung. These poets have either not known, or have forgotten, that the essential element of a song is to be singable, and that a fine thought, if expressed by words containing too many harsh and unvocal consonants, though it may appeal to the understanding, may fail to find interpretation from singers who require grace, melody, smoothness, and limpidity of meaning in songs, rather than intellectual strength or depth of suggestion, and that the true song should be above all things, as Milton expresses, simple, sensuous, and passion

ate.

Among living writers of songs, of whom a score at least might be mentioned with all befitting honor, the Laureate has been most successful in his efforts to charm his contemporaries in this branch of the poetic art. But his songs, like those of some of his compeers in the higher walks of poetry, have only found favor with the few, and have been of too high an order of literary merit to reach the hearts of the multitude. The serious minds of the age are engrossed with theological, scientific, and political questions, and have no real taste for the song, which they consider to be better adapted for the amusement of women than for that of men. The change in the habits and manners of the upper and more educated classes of society which has been in gradual operation for the last fifty or sixty years has been unfavorable to the appreciation of the song in the private circles where it flourished in the days of our great-grandfathers. Among these

classes, conviviality, as our ancestors understood it, is a thing of the past; and such bacchanalian orgies as they indulged in are now unknown in decent society, and would be held disgraceful if they were attempted. Songs are no longer sung at the dinner-table after the ladies have retired to the drawing-room, and to sit long at the wine is forbidden by the inexorable and unwritten law of society; and when conviviality went out of fashion enthusiasm went also though not perhaps as a necessary consequence.

The struggle for life and worldly position is so hard among all classes, and the disappointments that attend the struggle are so grievous and so many, as to produce a feeling that hope is a deluder, and that enthusiastic belief in or love for any thing is a foolish feeling and a mistake in which the wise will not indulge. And with enthusiasm, reverence for everything except money and the things that money will buy has become pretty nearly defunct in all classes of adult men and women, though still to some extent, not a large one, existent among the young who have not begun to reckon their ages among the "teens."

An evil example was set between forty and fifty years ago by many young writers who laid themselves out to be what is called “funny,” to become in fact profes sional punsters, by the composition of drearily comic books - among others by comic English and Latin grammars, by comic geographies, by comic histories of England; and who would in all probabil ity have written "comic" Bibles if they could have found a market for them. These writings had any amount of popularity, which contributed in no small degree to the deterioration of the literary taste of the then rising generation — a deterioration which has extended its baleful influence to their successors of the present day, and has not only invaded the private talk of society, but the theatre, and might even claim the monopoly of the drama were it not for the paramount and benign influence of Shakespeare. To such agency the public of the present and of a not long since departed day owes the hydraulic and pumped-up “fun” which is not funny, of the songs that now achieve the greatest popularity, and retain it for the longest time. Of this inane class are "Pop goes the Weasel," "Jump Jim Crow," "The Ratcatcher's Daughter," "The Chickaleerie Cove," "Tommy, make room for your Uncle," and other vulgarities that seem to fascinate the sons and daughters