58 ART. III.-1. English Songs. By Barry Cornwall. London: Moxon. 1844. 2. Songs, Ballads, and Poems, by the late Thomas Haynes Bayly. Edited by his Widow. 2 vols. London: Bentley. 1844. 3. Lyric Poetry of Glees, Madrigals, Catches, Rounds, Canons, and Duets. Compiled by Thomas Ludford Bellamy. London: R. and J. E. Taylor. 1844. 4. Lyra Urbanica; or, the Social Effusions of the celebrated Captain Charles Morris, late of the Life Guards. 2 vols. London: Bentley. 1840. 5. The Works of the Right Honourable Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Bart. From the originals in the possession of his grandson, the Earl of Essex, with Notes by Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford. 3 vols. London: Jeffrey and Son. 1822. 6. Songs of the late Charles Dibdin, with a Memoir. Collected and arranged by Thomas Dibdin. London: Murray. 1841. ENGLISH literature, from the age of Shakspeare until the present, has produced an extraordinary number of songs; and there has been scarcely a poet of great or small fame for the last two hundred and fifty years, who has not tried his powers in their production. Songs of love, of wine, of sentiment, of humour, of the sea, of the land, of the battle, of the chase, and of every class and character, and of various degrees of merit, have abounded in every era of our literature. Yet when we look back through the almost countless collections of these effusions that have from time to time been published, we look in vain for any possessing great and enduring genius; and equally in vain, the sea-songs excepted, for any that may be truly called English,-not merely in language, but in feeling, sentiment, character, and the thorough nationality which would show the land that produced them, if they were translated into French, Teutonic, Spanish, or any other language under the sun. If any other exception can be made, it is in favour of the glees and catches of olden days; which, although poor and tame, or nonsensical in the matter of poetry, had something peculiar and national in their form, and in the music to which they were adapted, and which have of late years gone too much out of fashion. The old ballads, too, of which Shakspeare has here and there preserved a snatch for our delight and admiration, had something English about them; as had the greater number of the ancient ballads that Percy has embalmed for us in his "Reliques," or which have been collected by the industrious labours of Ritson, Evans, and other poetical antiquaries. But ballads are not songs exactly; and even if they were, we should be justified in including them, if of a later date than the seventeenth century, in our assertion that English literature, abounding as it does in songs and ballads, has produced very few that are essentially English in their character, and that would not equally well suit the ideas and tastes of any other educated or semi-educated people in Europe. Scotland, on the contrary, has multitudes of songs that are eminently and peculiarly Scottish, and betray their origin, wherever they are met,-not by their dialect alone-for that may be polished to the choicest English and then may remain as Scottish as it was before, but by their thorough nationality of feeling. The same class and kind of song abounds among the Irish, and also among the Welsh. It also abounds in Germany and Switzerland, and to a less extent in France; and it becomes a serious question to discover how it is, that a people so poetical as the English, and who have produced poetry of more tenderness, elegance, high imagination, and dramatic power than any other modern nation, should nevertheless have failed to produce a great song-writer; or any one who could be classed for a moment in the same rank with the Burns of Scotland, the Beranger of France, or the Moore of Ireland. It may seem strange to account geographically or topographically for a song; and yet, upon reflection, it will be found that geography has something to do with it. We generally see that the inhabitants of a picturesque and a mountainous country are highly poetical in their temperament-deeply attached to their native land—and more musical than the inhabitants of a flat and unpicturesque region. Thus the Tyrolese, rude and uncultured as he may be, has a better ear for music than the Dutchman. The Swiss and the Scottish Highlanders again, and the Welsh and Irish, and the Spaniards of the mountains, are a poetical and musical people, and give vent to their passions and their sentiments in songs, which they sing to airs that they have been familiar with from childhood; while the people of the Netherlands, the North of France, and the coasts of the Baltic, and the rich flat lands of England, have less natural melody, and less of the devoted attachment to particular spots which is found in the songs of the other countries we have named, and which go so much farther than any other ingredients towards making them na tional. The English have little English music, and of that little the greater portion is of modern creation, and is not impregnated with the feelings and imagination of the people. Napoleon at St. Helena, when he had mistaken the beautiful melody of " Ye Banks and Braes of bonnie Doon" for an English air, rejoiced that England had at least one. When Miss Balcombe, who sang it, informed him of his mistake, he exclaimed, "English music is vile-the worst in the world;" and we are tempted to agree in his assertion. There is scarcely one ancient English tune that, were it played to an Englishman a thousand miles from his home, would bring that home vividly to his remembrance, and make him yearn to behold it again. But the Scotchman, or the Irishman, or the Swiss, or the Tyrolese has hundreds of such airs floating in his mind, each of which binds him in his heart to his native land, and only binds him the more strongly the further his fate leads him away from it. This we take to be one of the reasons why songs are not indigenous in England; and why, with all the richness of our literature, these effusions, with a few great exceptions which we shall name by and by, are exotics only, transplanted from other soils and breathing feelings of passion or tenderness, or mirth or earnest, which are common to the people of all nations, and bear no distinctive stamp upon them to mark them out as belonging to England, and proving by internal evidence that England alone could have produced them. One class, and one only, we have excepted, and with this we shall begin our consideration of English songs generally; and that is, the class of sea-songs. In this, one author has rendered his name famous as long as England shall remain a nation, and perhaps longer. The reader need scarcely be told that we mean Charles Dibdin. There were many sea-songs before his time,songs, too, of spirit, and energy, and national character; but he outshone all his predecessors. It should be mentioned, that among the earliest of the popular songs in the English language was a sea-song, "Ye Gentlemen of England." This, which was a favourite for a century and a half, and is still occasionally heard, has in more recent times served as a model for the triumphant battle-strain, "Ye Mariners of England," by Thomas Campbell, than which there does not exist in any language a lyric more noble in conception, or more grand and vigorous in treatment. Dibdin's sea-songs are of a more homely class, and merit the praises that all critics have lavished upon them, and the extensive popularity they have acquired. They are intensely and entirely English,-English in their feeling-contempt of danger-their prejudice-their jollity, and their trueheartedness, and would not suit the sailors of any other people. Every one sees at a glance, though he may never have been at sea, though he may not have mixed with sailors, and have received only the old traditionary or stage notions of their character, that the pictures are true pictures,-that the feelings are real ones, and such as no limner and no poet could invent;-just, as sometimes in a portrait we know it to be a likeness, from being struck with those little peculiar traits which carry conviction, though at the same time we may never have seen the individual represented. Who can mistake the character of Poor Jack? Who does not feel that he is a genuine Englishman, and a true sailor? and that there is no sailor like him on the face of the ocean, either for his peculiar virtues or his peculiar failings? And who does not own the genius of the poet that sang of him so well? "D'ye mind me, a sailor should be, every inch, All as one as a piece of the ship; And with her brave the world without offering to flinch, As for me, in all weathers, all times, sides and ends, For my heart is my Poll's, and my rhino's my friend's, Even when my time comes, ne'er believe me so soft For the same little cherub that sits up aloft, Will keep watch for the life of Poor Jack." Almost equal, though of a different strain, are the songs Nothing like Grog," and "The Sailor's Sheet-anchor;" in which the philosophy of drinking is laid down with a rough good sense, a quaintness of humour, and a truthfulness of character which seem so real, that we can almost smell tar and tobacco, and the fumes of rum and water, as we read: "One day, when the chaplain was preaching, And while be our duty was teaching, And he swigg'd-and Nick swigg'd- And swore there was nothing like grog." How true also is the careless philosophy, born of danger, and too familiar with it to fear it much, in the song entitled, "Each Bullet has got its Commission :" "What argufies pride and ambition? And when our time's come we must go. He that's now live and lusty, to-morrow Of a similar character, but more original and varied in its illustrations, is the song entitled "Grieving 's a Folly;" in which a sailor, after depicting the good and generous qualities of the many messmates with whom he had sailed, and describing the accidents that carried them from the world, winds up each doleful case by a reflection on the uselessness of sorrow, and a call to his listeners to be jolly. "Jack at the Windlass" is no less admirable, and is just such rough home-spun satire as we would expect from a sailor with a keen eye for the ludicrous-a discrimination enabling him to detect cant and hypocrisy and the easy rollicking good nature that would rather laugh at follies, than grieve at them with gall and bitterness of spirit, and that loves his messmates perhaps all the more from not being such paragons of virtue as to be a thousandfold better than himself. "Lovely Nan," again, and "The Sailor's Journal," are specimens of another kind, the genuine manly affection of a simple heart,-expressed in language that looks more truthful and sincere because tinctured with the idioms of his profession, and interlarded with sea similes. "True Courage" is a song of a different class,—but equally true-equally exquisite : "Why what's that to you, if my eyes I'm a wiping? "Tis nonsense for trifles, I own, to be piping, But they that han't pity-why, I pities they. Says the Captain, says he (I shall never forget it), But duty appeased, 'tis in mercy a lamb.'" "Tom Bowling," also, is a song differing from any of those we have cited, and touches every heart by its rough sincerity and genuine feeling. But every page of honest Dibdin that we turn over supplies us with a new variety; and though every song seems the genuine expression of the sentiment of a real British sailor that lived, and moved, and had his being among us, we find there is but little repetition of sentiment or imagery; and that the poet had the greatest of all poetic arts in high perfection, |