No. XXXV.
July 9, 1798.
The following popular song is said to be in great vogue among the loyal troops in the North of Ireland. The air and the turn of the composition are highly original. It is attributed (as our correspondent informs us) to a fifer in the Drumballyroney Volunteers.
BALLYNAHINCH.[[300]]
A NEW SONG.
I.
A certain great Statesman[[301]] whom all of us know,
In a certain assembly, no long while ago,
Declared from this maxim he never would flinch,
“That no town was so loyal as Ballynahinch”.
II.
The great statesman, it seems, had perused all their faces,
And been mightily struck with their loyal grimaces;
While each townsman had sung, like a throstle or finch,
“We are all of us loyal at Ballynahinch”.
III.
The great statesman return’d to his speeches and readings;
And the Ballynahinchers resumed their proceedings;
They had most of them sworn, “We’ll be true to the Frinch,”[[302]]
So loyal a town was this Ballynahinch!
IV.
Determined their landlord’s fine words to make good,
They hid pikes in his haggard, cut staves in his wood;
And attack’d the king’s troops—the assertion to clinch,
That no town is so loyal as Ballynahinch.
V.
O! had we but trusted the rebels’ professions,
Met their cannon with smiles, and their pikes with concessions;
Tho’ they still took an ell when we gave them an inch,
They would all have been loyal—like Ballynahinch.
Viri Eruditi,
Si vobis hocce poematium, de navali laude Britanniæ, paucis annis ante conscriptum, nuperrimè recensitum atque emendatum, forté arrideat, quærite in proximis vestris tabulis locum quendam secretum atque securum, ubi repositum suâ sorte perfruatur. Quod si in me hanc gratiam contuleritis, devinctus vobis ero et astrictus beneficio.
Etonensis.