Second Edition MDCCLXXXVII. (103 pp.) [I. S.]
Third Edition, M,DCC,XCIII. (2 ll. + 99 pp.) [I. S.]
L.
“A Famous Passover Melody,” by the Rev. F. L. Cohen
“... Isaac Nathan, a fashionable singing master of London ... conceived the idea of imitating the ‘Irish Melodies’ of Thomas Moore (batches of which had been published since 1807, with the greatest success).... Less fortunate than Moore, Byron’s verses were not wedded to melodies of the national type they professed, because even before Nathan had thus exhausted his choice, he had made a most superficial search through the repertory of the Anglo-Jewish synagogues of his day, which, by the way, had not yet experienced the inspiringly melodious influence of ‘Polish’ Chazanuth.... The opening poem, ‘She walks in beauty,’ for example, he set to a tawdry Lecha Dodi.... But among the six actually ‘Hebrew’ melodies, there were one or two exceptions to the general inferiority of the music; and prominent among these was the tender and expressive air to which, by a happy inspiration, Nathan set the verses:—
‘O weep for those that wept by Babel’s stream.’
Here, at least,
‘Music and sweet poetry agreed,
As well they should, the sister and the brother’;