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making, his wife-killing, and his quarrels | heart's delight," "Full merrily sings the with the pope, Cardinal Wolsey, and his cuckoo upon the beechen tree," "The great nobles, found time to write songs, one of which was entitled "Pastime with Good Company." In a MS. still in existence, and known to be of his reign, are two songs, in pure though quaint English, which may be quoted as among the earliest songs remaining in the language:

Ah my sweet sweeting My little pretty sweeting, My sweeting will I love, wherever I go. She is so proper and pure,

Full steadfast, stable, and demure, There is none such, you may be sure,

As my sweet sweeting.

The other, entitled "The Loyal Lover," is equally smooth and vocal:

As I lie sleeping
In dreams fleeting
Ever my sweeting
Is in my mind.
She is so goodly
With looks so lovely,
That no man truly

Such one can find.

There seems to be little or no authority for the statement that King Henry the Eighth himself wrote these songs; or, if he did, whether they were in celebration of the charms of the "sweetings" whose heads he cut off, or of those whose heads he spared. But, whoever was the author of them, these and similar songs were like the first faint radiance that precedes the dawn. The dawn and the daylight were yet to come. Among the singing birds of the twilight, the most melodious were Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose son was beheaded on Tower Hill, and the unfortunate Earl of Surrey, who himself suffered on the block for alleged complicity in the treasons of an age when it was difficult to know what was treason and what was not. At length, as political affairs became somewhat more settled, the full daylight of poetry burst forth. The Elizabethan dramatists, with Shakespeare at their head, and Edmund Spenser, chief of the non-dramatic poets, inaugurated the new era. It was then that English poetry and song entered into the golden age. In the blaze of that sudden glory the inferior compositions of the ballad-mongers were left entirely to the lower rank of the people; many of them are still in existence, and still sung, such as some of the famous ballads to be found in Percy's "Reliques" the poacher's song, "'Tis my delight, on a shiny night," "Women are best When they are at rest," "Sweet Nelly, my

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frog came to the mill-door" (since modernized into "The frog he would a-wooing go"), "I'll ne'er get drunk again," and the mariners' glee, "We be three mariners" — probably the oldest sea-song that England can boast. The only two names of note that have reached the present age in connection with this early song-literature are William Tarleton and Martin Parker both somewhat later than the time of Shakespeare. Martin Parker deserves especial notice as the man who wrote the well-known song, "Ye gentlemen of England". a song not only excellent in itself, but entitled to double gratitude for having served Thomas Campbell as the model, on which he built "Ye mariners of England," one of the noblest songs ever written in any language. Martin Parker's song sets itself to music:

Ye gentleman of England

Who live at home at ease,
Ah, little do you think upon
The dangers of the seas!
Give ear unto the mariners,
And they will plainly show
All the cares, and the fears,

When the stormy winds do blow.

It used to be the fashion of the English peasantry to paste these songs in cupboards, on the lids of trunks, or on the backs of doors a custom which has been one great cause why so many of them have been lost without hope of recovery. Could they have been preserved, they might have thrown the light of contemporary poetry on the history of manners and afforded us glimpses into the every day life of our forefathers at a period particularly interesting, when the art of printing was bringing forth its first flowers and fruits, operating important changes in the national character, and preparing the way for the final triumphs of the Reformation. Similar songs are still printed for the use of the rural districts, and sold - humiliating thought to the pride of song writers! at a halfpenny or a penny a yard.

The song-writers of the age of Shakespeare were many and excellent. Among his contemporaries, or those who preceded and followed him, were two or three who wrote songs almost as well as he did — none who wrote better. The associated dramatists Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Herrick, George Wither, Thomas Carew, Sir Walter Raleigh, John

Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Lovelace, and George Herbert are but a few out of a long list of poets of whose works any fair criticism would occupy a volume, so full are they of heartiness and beauty. Some of Ben Jonson's songs are exquisite in their delicacy and grace. Every one has read (or heard sung) the delicious song- better than anything attributed to Anacreon, or any Greek or Roman writer whatsoever Drink to me only with thine eyes," a paraphrase from the Low Latin of a nameless poet in the Middle Ages, and a great improvement on its original a song sufficient for fame if its author had written nothing else. Most people have read or heard the song of Sir Henry Wotton, worth a whole library of inferior compositions :

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You meaner beauties of the night,
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your numbers than your light,
You common people of the skies,
What are you when the moon shall rise?

Who does not know the songs of George Wither? The chorus of one of them has passed into the select family of familiar quotations :

Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die, because a woman's fais?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
Because another's rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flowery meads in May,
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?

Robert Herrick wrote many songs of the highest merit, and particularly distinguished above those of all his contemporaries by the fluency of their melody, and the luxuriant charm of their phraseology. But Shakespeare was the prince of all the song-writers of his age. It may be said of him that, had he not been the greatest of epic poets, the greatest of lawyers, the greatest of anything great to which it pleased him to direct the energies of his great mind, he would most certainly have been a great song-writer, for the songs which he has scattered through his plays are all of them models either of wit, or grace, or tenderness, or of a nameless beauty comprising all these. Every one, at some time or other of his life, must have rejoiced over the frolicsome little song redolent of the green fields and flowers of England:

Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat?

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Every one who reads knows the two charming pictures of spring and winter sung in "Love's Labor Lost," both of them full of humor and of accurate painting from nature, and both of them adapted to such excellent music by Dr. Arne who lived a century afterwards - as to make every listener regret that Shakespeare himself never had the felicity of hearing the manner in which great composers can render the meaning of great poets. One other song of Shakespeare has been the favorite of successive generations of musicians, from the age of Milton to our own, who have striven with each other to do it justice:

Take, oh! take those lips away
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,

Lights that do mislead the morn.

The golden age of English lyrical poetry did not die with Shakespeare. Its lustre. was not dimmed even by the troubles of the Revolution, although the number of poets who arose from the accession of Charles the First to the restoration of Charles the Second was small compared! with the number who adorned the age of Elizabeth and James. The age immediately succeeding that of Shakespeare pro.. duced Milton, Cowley, Lovelace, Waller;. and Dryden, and a host of inferior men.

These, like all the greatest poets whom England has known, attempted song-writing. Milton was a musician, and understood all the fine shades and niceties of language which songs require, if they are meant to be sung. He also, had he chosen to devote himself to lyrical instead of epic poetry, might have enriched literature with many matchless compositions. Perhaps if he had done so he might have been dearer and more familiar to his countrymen. As he is, he is too great and too mighty for their love. His poetical character inspires awe and reverence rather than affection. He sits blind. and solitary on the cold summits of Parnassus, wrapped in a blaze of glory, inaccessible to the plaudits of the crowd. who behold him from afar. Yet when we think of him as the author of "Il Penseroso and "L'Allegro," of "Lycidas," and of " Comus," we take him to our hearts, and lose some portion of our reverence in the new love we feel for him. In all his songs and lyrical poems there is an Italian

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Prior to Chloe Jealous.

sweetness mixed with an English force | place. Matthew Prior a fortunate versewhich scarcely needs any aid from the art maker and flatterer of the great, and who of the composer to shape them into music. wrote himself into an embassy and a pen. Cowley did not excel in song writing. sion- expressed in some famous and Nature had not endowed him with a fine often-quoted lines to "Chloe Jealous "the ear, and, like Wordsworth and Sir Walter | low opinion he entertained of the art he Scott in our own day, he could not readily cultivated: 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 char-
acter 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

To be vexed at a trifle or two that I writ,
Your judgment at once and my passion you

wrong;

You take that for a fact which will scarce be found wit.

Od's life! must one swear to the truth of a song?

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 !

Now poor men starve and die, and are not Good hospitality was cherished then of many, helped by any;

For

Charity waxeth cold, and Love is found

in few ;

Not so in time of old, when this old cap was new!

were not allowed to copy the French and In that day, as in the present, the ladies dress as they pleased, or wear hoops, or the vices of the court of Charles the Second, when every moral sentiment was from the song-writers, who then, and not any other abomination, without a protest deadened or debauched; when hospital-newspaper editors, were the leaders of ity degenerated into boisterous and depublic opinion. grading 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 goodness; 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

Our ladies in those days in civil habit went;
Broad-cloth was then worth praise, and gave
the best content;

French fashions then were scorned; such fan-
And
gles no one knew;

modesty women adorned, when this old

cap was new!

To the period of unblushing vice and effrontery succeeded a period of false pretence. Love played at masquerade;

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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

gland 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 sufficient to set at rest such doubtful points. This test is unfortunately wanting in most inquiries of the kind, and even when ap

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 Qua-half of the churches and chapels of Entorze. 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|plied is not always adequate to the appar. 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 hy brid, 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

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

Among the song-writers of this and the preceding age is Thomas or "Tom" Durfey, 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 Su

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 in-san," one of the most popular songs in the different. 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

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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.

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

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