And gaily lent their silv’ry light,
When first she vow’d to love me.
But now I’m bound to Brighton Camp,
Kind Heaven then pray guide me,
And send me safely back again
To the girl I’ve left behind me.
This air has been claimed as Irish by Moore and by Bunting. The former took great liberties with the air. Bunting left it as he found it. But he did not find it till the year 1800, when he heard it played by an Irish harper named O’Neile. The harper had probably picked it up from some regimental band leaving their quarters; but it was popular in England nearly half a century before the date of its first being known in Ireland.
Let those who throng Brighton now just consider what it was about a century ago. In 1761 we read that ‘the men of the town were wholly employed in fishing, and the women in mending their nets.’ There was, however, a free school in Brighton; and boys of twelve years of age, who had learned navigation there, obtained very fair wages in the ‘fishery.’ There was a population, fixed and movable, even at that period. Many of the houses are described as ‘of flint, with windows and doors frequently adorned with very good brick.’ When Brighton took its first step forward for the purpose of attracting visitors we may learn from a contemporary chronicle of 1761, in which we read that ‘Of late the town has become a resort for the drinking of salt water and for bathing. If the town grows in the next seven years as it has done in the last seven, there will be no better in England.’ Brighton then boasted of ‘one or two public rooms that could be equalled only by those of York.’ People could then put up with what was called ‘accommodation,’ which was of a very uncomfortable character; but everything was of a free-and-easy quality, and most visitors were content to take things as they found them.
To this rule, however, there was one notable exception, just where we should expect to find it.
Nearly a hundred years have elapsed since Dr. Johnson wrote to Boswell, in November of the year 1776, ‘I was some weeks this autumn at Brighthelmstone. The place was very dull, and I was not well.’ The fact is, that Johnson cared little for the beauties of nature. He was like Charles Lamb, who once being at the summit of a mountain from which there was a prospect of unsurpassable grandeur, saw nothing but with his mind’s eye, and that was at the moment directed to the ham and beef shop at the corner of St. Martin’s Court. In like manner, Johnson hated prospects and views. We have the authority of Mrs. Piozzi for recording that Johnson used to say the best garden was the one which produced the most roots and fruits, and the river most to be prized was the one which produced the most fish. The Doctor unmercifully laughed at Shenstone for valuing a stream according to its picturesqueness, and not its productiveness. Mrs. Piozzi believed that a walk in a wood when it rained was the only rural image which pleased Johnson. The pleasure then was perhaps derived from the thought that the rain would swell the peas, or make the turnips grow, or in some way or other tend to the comforting of the inward man. The feeling was akin to that of the epicurean who dwelt fondly on the orient gale which prospered the ship freighted with sugar for his gooseberry pie. It was that of Southey’s philosopher, who reverenced pig, and who, feeling a certain amount of poetry in a fragrant breeze, exclaimed,