Is happy indeed if ’twas never deceiv’d.
But send round the bowl; while a relic of truth
Is in man or in woman, this pray’r shall be mine,
That the sunshine of love may illumine our youth,
And the moonlight of friendship console our decline.
“The airs of the first number are excessively beautiful in themselves—particularly those of the well known “Gramachree,” “Plausty Kelly,” and the “Summer is Coming,” and the duets of “The Maid of the Valley,” and the “Brown Maid,” are very delightful. “The latter (says the London reviewer) is a perfect specimen of the genius of duet, each part taking up the other alternately. The publication of these Irish airs fully discovers the source of Mr. Moore’s musical compositions.”
Speaking of the second number, the reviewer says it is by no means inferior to the first either in music or in poetry. The air “Oh! weep for the hour” (“The Pretty Girl of Derby O!”) is harmonized in a style of great elegance; and that, and “The Red Fox,” “The Black Joke,” and “My Lodging is on the Cold Ground,” have particularly pleased us in their arrangement. The song which Mr. Moore has written to “The Black Joke,” is both poetical and political, and though the affairs of Spain have now rendered it, as to that country, an old newspaper, yet it is still good in the cause of Ireland.”
[ SPORTING INTELLIGENCE.]
The coterie of old ladies in the British parliament, the chairwoman of which was the late sir Richard Hill, have failed in all their attempts to tie up the hands of the people from their old sports. They have declaimed in parliament, and they have declaimed in print, against all the gymnastic exercises which time immemorial have been the pride and the pastime of the hardy natives of the British islands. Never did Robespierre weep such unfeigned tears over “sweet bleeding humanity,” as those good souls have shed over the broken heads, and black eyes, and bloody noses of the Bull family, who, obstinate dogs, will still go on and laugh at their ladyships. Indeed Bonaparte himself, whose interest it really is, could not more anxiously desire the abolition of those gymnastic exercises.
The sports of England are horse-racing; fox, hare, and stag-hunting; coursing with greyhounds; shooting, fishing, bull-baiting, wrestling, single stick, pugilism, pedestrianism, cricket, &c. These are practised by all ranks and on national accounts, are encouraged by all the wise and patriotic men of the country; some few, and those mostly fanaticks, excepted. To those games they add, in Ireland, the noble sport of hurling, in which that vigorous race exhibit such prodigies of strength and activity as induced the celebrated Arthur Young to speak to this effect in his Tour through Ireland: “In their hurlings, which I would call the cricket of savages, they perform feats of agility that would not do discredit to Sadler’s Wells.”