‘Oh ye fair hills of holy Ireland, who dares sustain the strangled calumny that you are not the land of our love?

Who is he who ventures to stand between us and your Catholic sons’ good-will? What though for three centuries they and we [32] have made your valleys resound with the clang of axe and broadsword, ringing on chain-mail and plate-armour, or with the thunder of artillery tearing their way into bloody lanes, through columns and solid square, or with the discordant clash of pike or bayonet, and the vollied rattling of more deadly musket thinning the contracted lines, [...] What though in times long past they startled your midnight echoes with our groans under the knife that spared neither bedridden age nor cradled infancy, [...] what though the thick dregs of sanguinary intoxication are still poured forth by Discord’s Ganymedes, and still quaffed savagely in many a misty glen and black bog of your mountains. - What then? It was for love of you that we contended, for possession and enjoyment of you that we trampled down our rivals on your bosom; and now that the nuptial knot is tied and consecrated between us, nothing save the sword of Alexander shall dissolve the Gordian consummation! But who would be the jealous Turk to say, that those amorous Irishmen, whose love has been as constant as our own, and more legitimate by ages of possession, should not be admitted to all the privileges of a national panogamy? May we never again behold the Curragh of Kildare if wew would be that sordid tyrant for all the wealth and power of the British empire. The only emulation between us shall be in the honest endeavour of each to benefit and protect the common object of our affection; and, scorning the rancour of low rivalry that would content with misrepresentation, detraction, or suppression, we will be the first to tell the world what genius, what bravery, what loyalty, what pious love of country and kind has been vindicated to the mere Irish by Mr. Hardiman, in his collection and preservation of their national songs. Mr. Hardiman’s collection is truly a boon to the Irish reader. But the Irish reader is, in general, a being who exercises little influence on the book market; form howve highly he may appreciate the service done him, he must confine his expression of thanks to the few who have been hitherto supposed to sympathise with a poor scholar, a Papist and an Connaughtman.

Much as the announcement may mortify some who would usurp the exclusive right to Catholic good-will, we declare ourselves one of the number of those who can feel for, and sympathise with, the poor Papist, [33] whether drudging on the wharfs of London, or eating limpets and sea weed on the rocks of Erris, or toiling homeward from the harvest of rich Britain, lying poorly in barns or ditches by the wayside, or herded like one of a drove of swine on the wet deck of a collier; or, when he has returned sitting perhaps on the bleak hill side, and looking back, with wife and hungry little ones, on the roof he has been forced to relinquish at the bidding of a cruel landlord; nay, to the most distant dens of squalid and savage barbarism, where burnings, housebreakings, rapes, assassinations, are to the ruffian conspirator familiar as the glass he drains; and to the very files of the marching marauders, as they line the road by which their victim is expected, we are not ashamed to declare that we can extend our indignant commiseration, and are not yet hopeless of obtaining the grateful confidence of an undeceived and rescued people in return. We will not suffer two of the finest races of men in the world, the Catholic and Protestant, or the Milesian and Anglo-Irish, to be duped into mutual hatred by the tale-bearing go-betweens who may struggle in impotent malice against our honest efforts, even though the panders of dissension should be willing to pay out of their own pockets as some, who may look to their backs and shoulders, have done - for the satisfaction of setting us by the ears. But let it first be our task to make the people of Ireland better acquainted with one another. We address in these pages the Protestant wealth and intelligence of the country, an interest acknowledged on all hands to be the depository of Ireland’s fate for good or evil. The Protestants of Ireland are wealthy and intelligent beyond most classes, of their numbers, in the world: but their wealth has hitherto been insecure, because their intelligence has not embraced a thorough knowledge of the genius and disposition of their Catholic fellow-citizens.

The genius of a people at large is not to be learned by the notes of Sunday tourists. The history of centuries must be gathered, published, studied and digested, before the Irish people can be known to the world, and to each other, as they ought to be. We hail, with daily-increasing pleasure, the spirit of research and liberality which is manifesting itself in all the branches of our national literature, but chiefly in our earlier history and antiquities - subjects of paramount importance to every people who respect, or even desire to respect themselves. Let us contribute our aid to the auspicious undertaking, and introduce the Saxon and the Scottish Protestant to an acquaintance with the poetical genius of a people hitherto [34; DUM, p.455] unknown in them, as being known only in a character incompatible with sincerity or plain dealing. The present century will not answer the conditions of our enquiry. We will look nearer to times when they who had high treason in their hearts and arms in their hands, and honest defiance on their faces - when the game of nations was played boldly and won fairly - when victors and vanquished could afford to seem what they really were, and genuine feeling found utterance undisguised, in the passionate sincerity of exultation or despair. We will leave the idiotic brawler, the bankrupt and fraudulent demagogue, the crawling incendiary, the scheming, jesuitical, ambitious priest - that perverse rabble, on whom the mire in which they have wallowed for the last quarter of a century, has caked into a crust like the armour of the Egyptian beast, till they are case-hardened invulnerably in the fit of habitual impudence, ingratitude, hypocrisy, envy and malice; so that it were but a vain defilement of aught manly and honorable to advance it against such panoply of every foul component - we will leave them to their employment of reproach or agitation, and sing the songs of men who might well rise from honourable graves, and affright the midnight [evhoes] of Aughrim and Benburb with their lamentations, if they could know that their descendents were fools enough to be left by such a directory of knaves and cowards

‘[...] Again shift back the scene till the roar of the artillery is heard no longer, and the only smoke of battle is the steam of reeking men and horses; and over the same valley, now all uncultivated, yet green in deep, delicious pasture, we see the ancestors of the same men who vainly strove with British discipline at Kinsale and the Boyne, now still more vainly striving with one another, for the possession, perhaps, of the unconscious brutes scared from their grazing ground beside, perhaps of the grey ruin crumbling on the hill above; or, it may be, as it often was, for the mere lust of inflicting pain, and the mad glory of fighting. A horrid sight! They hack one another with brazen knives; they pierce one another with flint-headed arrows and the barbed blades of javelins; they torture the dying; they mangle and insult over the dead. Woe to the conquered! Wives and little ones, old men and maidens mingled in common massacre, expire among the ruins of the huts or the unavailing defences of their earthen rampart. No sulphurous canopy here to hide them from the eye of day; but all on the open plain, where summer dust never soiled a daisy, do the heroic savages exult before the face of heaven, while bards and Seanachies contend in glorifying the brave atrocity!

Alas! how soon have we forgotten that love was to have been our theme! How soon has the sad necessity of Irish history drawn us into the strife, and cruelty, and desolation, and despair, by the modifications of which alone can we compare the different aspects of early Irish society - a society which has differed little from the days of Henry to those of George, save in degrees of violence or misery. But let war and famine do their worst, love is immortal and the same; and the valley before us, with all its successions of disfigurement and desolation, has never missed its May tribute of sighs and songs. The flowers of our forest are hard to weed away. Seven hundred years of disaster, as destructive as ever consumed the vitals of any country, have each in succession seen our people perishing by famine or the sword in almost every quarter of the land; yet at this day there is neither mountain, plain, nor valley that is not rife with generations of the unextinguishable nation; long may they walk upon our hills with the steps of freemen! long may they make our valleys ring with the songs of that love which has thus made them indomitable in defeat and ineradicable in a struggle of extermination!

These are the songs before us - songs such as the speakers of [37] the English language at large have never heard before, and which they could not see and hear now but for the pious labours of a man who, however politically malignant and religiously fanatical, has yet done such good service to his country in their collection and preservation, that for her sake we half forgive him our own quarrel, and consent to forego a great part of its vindication.

Those who have known the melodies of Ireland only in association with the delightful lyrics of Moore, will, we fear, be startled to find them connected with songs so marked as these are, by all the characteristics which distinguish the productions of rude, from those of refined society. Moore’s Melodies, indeed, present a combination of the most delightful attributes of music and poetry, unattainable otherwise than by uniting the music of a rude age to the poetry of a refined one. The hardships, dangers, and afflictions which must have crushed the heart of the musician before it could so shed its whole life-blood of passion into the absorbing and almost painful pathos of an Irish melody, must have been too destructive of all security to have admitted even an approach to that devoted leisure which alone could qualify a writer for success in finished poetry. The contrast between the native songs and the lyrics of Moore is indeed strangely striking - as strange as uncouthness can present in juxtaposition with politeness, but still no more than that which may be admitted to have distinguished the Merus Hibernicus, from the modern Irish gentleman. We will look in vain for the chasteness, the appositeness, the antithetical and epigrammatic point, and the measured propriety of prosody, which delight the car and the judgment, in a song by Thomas Moore, among the rude rhymes which accompanied the same notes two centuries ago; but the stamen and essence of each is interwoven and transfused through the whole texture and complexion of the other - for sentiment is the soul of song, and sentiment is one imprescriptible property of the common blood of all Irishmen.

What we mean by Irish sentiment, we hope to show in the progress of our notices; and we can execute our purpose only by adhering to the strict severity of literal translation. We have exemplified Irish adulation, Irish whimsicality, and Irish fun and jollity in the songs of Carolan, with a fidelity painful to ourselves, as it was derogatory from the character so long reflected on Carolan’s poetic, from his musical talent. If we have done that wonderful musician poetic injustice, we will give his poetic defenders their revenge in kind; for it is our purpose, sometime about the Lammas floods, to give an appendix to this series, containing, along with some communications of considerable interest and from rather distinguished persons, as many versions as we think ourselves and our aids sufficiently happy in, to warrant the assurance which we now beg to give our readers - that whatever versions of Irish song may find their way into our pages shall be as faithful as the best talents of ourselves and our assistants can secure - therefore should any Irish scholar, conscious of a good talent for translation conceive that he can set Carolan right with the English reader, (which we confess we ourselves almost despair of being able to do,) we will be happy to give his versions our best consideration for insertion with those alluded to.

Meanwhile, whatever beauties may remain concealed in the songs of Carolan, we will proceed with those which furnish less suspicious and equally, if not more, available material for a judgment on the subject proposed. Heaven help us! what a key to the whole melancholy mystery is here. It is the first part of the “Song of Sorrow”, and mournfully true to its name it is.

Desire, despair, and the horrible reality of actual famine these are three dread prompters of song. Whoever first sung the “Song of Sorrow” had felt them all; but desire was his paramount inspirer, and the concluding stanzas rise into such a fervid frenzy of undisguised desire that we shrink from exhibiting them in their [39] literal English. Yet there is nothing impure, nothing licentious in their languishing but savage sincerity. This is the one great characteristic of all the amatory poetry of the country; and in its association with the despondency of conscious degradation, and the recklessness of desperate content, is partly to be found the origin of that wild, mournful, incondite, yet not uncouth, sentiment which distinguishes the national songs of Ireland from those of perhaps any other nation in the world. We say in this is “partly” to be found the source of that peculiarity which marks Irish sentiments; for we believe that great proportion of the characteristics of a people are inherent, not fictitious; and that there are as essential differences between the genius[es] as between the physical appearances of nations.

We believe that no dissipating continuance of defeat, danger, famine, or misgovernment could ever, without the absolute infusion of Milesian blood, Hibernicize the English peasant; and that no stultifying operation of mere security, plenty, or laborious regularity could ever, without actual physical transubstantiation, reduce the native Irishman to the stolid standard of the sober Saxon. Holding these opinions, our object must be rather to ascertain what Irish sentiment is, than why or whence it may be so or so. The great ingredient in the sentiment of the song we have just translated is desire; yet that song is called the Song of Sorrow - not, as we conceive, on account of those misfortunes, however miserable, which rendered that an unattainable desire; but rather because the hopelessness of passion rises to such a paramount excess of anguish as overbears and obliterates all other griefs, and would make the lamentation of the hopeless lover pining among all that wealth and peace could give to comfort him, as bitterly woeful as that of the wan outlaw himself; were it not that the comparatively artificial state of feeling induced by the influences of wealth and refinement, renders such passionate excess in civilized life too rare to justify the general application of such a supposition.

No doubt, the poignancy of the fugitive’s disappointment must have been greatly exasperated by the recollection that it had been his own rebellion (for the Song of Sorrow was composed by a fugitive rebel,) which had plunged him into this bitter abyss where desire turned to languishment, and hope to despair: still the great strength of the song’s concentrated pathos lies in deploring the effect, not in deprecating the cause. He does not blame the illfortune that struck him down before his enemy in battle, or that drove him bleeding and bare from his burned homestead to lead the life of a wild [40] animal among the woods and mountains: there is no reproach against the treachery or cowardice of his people, no complaint of the misery and insecurity of his country - and yet, had it not been for these, black Uilecan had surely been his own - no; he has but one wish, the enjoyment of his love; one grief, the hopelessness of having his desire; and there is nothing for him but to blaspheme heaven and fly - and he does blaspheme heaven - “Great God! why am I thus denied My Uilecan dubh 0?” is the last exclamation of his agony, as, diving into the deepest forest of the Black Valley, he bursts away for the Lakes of Leitrim wild as the red deer in September.

Let us no longer imagine that humour is the characteristic of the Irish. Their sentiment is pathetic. Desire is the essence of that pathos - desire, either for the possession of love unenjoyed, or for the continuance of love being enjoyed, or for the restoration of enjoyed love lost. We know no Irish song addressed to the judgment: if an Irish song fail to go to the heart at once, it fails outright. Even in the most whimsical there is some touch of sentiment, some appeal to the pathetic principle. So also in their music, as admirably exemplified by Mr Moore in his dedication of the first number of the Melodies, where, alluding to the characteristic introduction of a flat third, he draws the same inference from its effect in harmony, which we would deduce from the presence when least expected of some pathetic allusion in the lyric composition of some of their most extravagantly humorous rhymes [...]’ (pp.37-40.)

‘[P]eople the desert wiith bold men and chaste women, and you have the elements of a nation, though its metropolis be a kraal, and its via regia a sheep track.

Our capital is no circle of log huts, our royal road is no green forest pass, no ragged mountain pathway. Dublin with her palaces, deserted though they are, were no unworthy residence for kings and legislators; our great northern line, unfreqauented though the travelling carriage of native absentee or foreign proprietor may be upons its level causeway, were no unmeet avenue for the returning march of victorious armies, or the peaceful pomp of regal or viceregal progresses. Our people, we believe, before Heaven, to be as brave and as virtuous a people as the world ever saw. Female purity is ever the concomitant, the crown and halo of true love; and the sentiment of legitimate desire, as we have illustrated it in our preceding paper, is not more nationally characteristic of our courageous countrymen than is this its purer, though twin sister, attribute, of the virgins, wives, and matrons, whom we rejoice to recall our fair and merry countrywomen. No - whatever calamitous degradation the violence of an oppressive conquest, or the lingering tyranny of a debasing priestcraft may have exercised in other regards upon the moral condition of the Irish, however self-respect and manly charity may have been thrust down by the iron heel of an unavoidable civil domination; however reason and free intellect may have been prostrated by the hoofs of a more brutal spiritual ascendancy, virtue, evading alike the spurns of power and the trampling march of superstition, has risen, is rising, and will rise, immaculate as the love it fosters, indomitable as the nation it redeems. Let violence and discord do their worst; while virtue is our people’s heritage we will not despair for Ireland.

Eight millions of people cannot for ever remain in obscurity; sooner or later Ireland must rise into importance, perhaps as an emulator, perhaps as an equal, perhaps as a superior to the other members of our imperial confederacy. Let politicians quarrel as to the means, all Irishmen must be unanimous in common aspiration for that noble end; but, if our country were to attain to power and distinction only by forfeiting these virtues which have hallowed her adversity, we would rather see her chained for ever to the level of her present civil degradation, than emulating France in military renown, while she imitated her in heartless sensuality, or rivalling England herself in political and commercial influence, while a like indifference to humble honor made the churchwarden’s liability her peasant girl’s best portion. As this never has been, so, we [42] trust, it never can be in Ireland: the Irish heart must first be stripped of all those characteristics which most ennoble its peculiar constitution; and to effect that revolution, which neither ignorance, nor superstition, nor brutalising exclusion from humane society has been able to bring about through seven hundred years of outrage and outlawry, will, with God’s help, be equally impracticable, by whatever knowledge, or power, or lawful luxury may come in the train of those long centuries of improvement that are yet in store for her. o far, then, from yielding to despair, we rejoice in all auspicious hopes for our country. The arts of civilized life have already half-forestalled the national civilization.

Great works, which in common progress of society must have been preceded by a development of local intelligence and enterprize adequate to their conception and execution are, by a generous anomaly, extended through our most remote and savage districts; high roads, canals, embankments, piers, and harbours, await prospective use and reproductive operation; and dormant facilities for the development of unimagined applications of advancing art are prepared by nature over and under the whole face of the high-destined country. But are our people such as could make a nation of the desert, much more of such a rich and well-conditioned island? Education based upon the only true basis - scriptural education alone is wanted to make our men as bbld as our women are chaste - to make us a nation of enlightened, liberal, and prosperous people - assertors of our own rights, respecters of the rights of others - a truly integral and influential portion of the empire, repudiating alike the insolent violence of civil degradation and the hideous impiety of spiritual thraldom - in the fullest sense of the words, bold men, honoured by others and respected by ourselves [...] (Storey, edn., 1988, pp.41-43.)

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‘The clansman idolises his chief instead of venerating the sentiment of patriarchal supremacy ... of a legitimate monarchy.’ [On fosterage:] ‘we can readily find an excuse for [English] law against communication with the Irish, which, if not justified by the existence of a contagion so catching, would appear unnecessarily and atrociously cruel.’ ‘Let us contribute our aid to the auspicious undertaking, and introduce the Saxon and Scottish Presbyterian to an acquaintance with poetical genius of a people hitherto unknown to them, as being known only in a character compatible with sincerity and plain dealing. The present century will not answer the conditions of our enquiry. We will look nearer to times when they who had high treason in their hearts had arms in their hands, and honest defiance on their faces - when the game of nations was played boldly and won fairly - when victors and vanquished could afford to seem what they really were, and genuine feeling found utterance undisguised, in the passionate sincerity of exultation or despair.

We will leave the idiotic brawler, the bankrupt and fraudulent demagogue, the crawling incendiary, the scheming, Jesuitical, ambitious priest - that perverse rabble, on whom the mire in which they have wallowed for the last quarter of a century has caked into a crust like the armour of the Egyptian beast, till they are case hardened invulnerably in the filth of habitual impudence, ingratitude, hypocrisy, envy and malice; so that it were but a vain defilement of aught manly or honourable to advance it against such panoply of every foul component - we will leave them to their employment of reproach and agitation, and sing the songs of men who might well rise from honourable graves, and affright the midnight echoes of Antrim or Benburb with their lamentations, if they could know that their descendants were fools enough to be led by such a directory of knaves and cowards.’ (Dublin University Magazine, Vol. III, No. XVI, April 1834, p.457; cited in Brown, op. cit., 1975, pp. 32-33.)

‘We have hitherto so slightly alluded to the accompanying metrical versions of Mr. Hardiman’s collection, that the reader may not improbably suppose it, what we sincerely wish it were, a mere compilation of untranslated Irish pieces. It were fortunate for the subject had it been so; but the laudable desire of making the English reader acquainted with the style and sentiment of our native poetry, has, unfortunately, induced Mr. Hardiman to attach versions so strangely unlike the originals both in sentiment and style, as to destroy alike the originality and the interest of Irish minstrelsy for those who can only appreciate it through such a medium.

It is but justice to the gentlemen who furnished these translations to observe, that their labour was gratuitous and the task peculiarly difficult. Indeed the disinterestedness (so far as it concerns pecuniary matters) which characterises the whole undertaking, challenges the highest praise. Mr. Hardiman collected and compiled, and Messrs. D’Alton, Furlong, Curran, and other well-disposed and learned men versified the translations of the compiled matter, and presented the whole, without recompense of any kind, as a mark of their esteem to Mr. Robbins, the publisher. We regret that, while we applaud the purpose, we must unequivocally condemn the execution. All the versifiers seem to have been actuated by a morbid desire, neither healthy nor honest, to elevate the tone of the original to a pitch of refined poetic art altogether foreign from the whole genius and rationale of its composition. We are sorry to be obliged to add, that the majority of these attempts are spurious, puerile, unclassical - lamentably bad. [the foregoing quoted in Cronin, op. cit., 1996, p.108-09.]