“Is it sail ye are after makin’? and do ye mane to take all these poor crathurs away wid you? No, faith; another kiss and another man.”
I am not going to relate how many kisses these lovely girls bestowed on the envied captain. If such are captains’ perquisites, who would not be a captain? Suffice it to say, they got the whole of their countrymen released, and returned on board in triumph.
Lord Brougham used to say that he always laughed at the settlement of pin-money, as ladies were generally either kicked out of it, or kissed out of it; but his lordship, in the whole course of his legal practice, never saw a captain of a man-of-war kissed out of forty men by two pretty Irish girls. After this, who would not shout “Erin go bragh!”
ANCIENT IRISH LITERATURE.
Number 5.
The specimen of our ancient Irish Literature which we now present to our readers, is one of the most popular songs of the peasantry of the counties of Mayo and Galway, and is evidently a composition of that most unhappy period of Irish history, the seventeenth century. The original Irish which is the composition of one Thomas Lavelle, has been published without a translation, by Mr Hardiman, in his Irish Minstrelsy; but a very able translation of it was published in a review of that work in the University Magazine for June 1834. From that translation the version which we now give has been but slightly altered so as to adapt it to the original melody, which is of very great beauty and pathos, and one which it is desirable to preserve with English words of appropriate simplicity of character:—
THE COUNTY OF MAYO.
I.
On the deck of Patrick Lynch’s boat I sit in woful plight,
Through my sighing all the weary day, and weeping all the night.