ever, in the face of one creature we saw the glowing anger spot: “Infamous! he ought to be taken up-come away!" and she urged a matronly companion, who placidly replied, "Not yet, Mary Annelet's wait, only just to hear how far the fellow's impudence will carry him." (It would possibly shock the self-love of many sulphureous lecturers, followed as they seem for the beauty of their talk, were the true cause of their popularity as ingenuously unfolded to them.)

The Sailor Ballad-Singer has died with the long peace; he no longer attacks our sympathies with one arm and a wooden leg: maimed limbs have become scarce. Now and then, when we presume little is to be got by picking pockets-for, in all professions, there is, probably, a longer or shorter vacation-half-a-dozen fellows condescend to wear check shirts, and, if the weather be fiercely cold, to walk with bare, clean-washed feet, executing, as they pick their way, “Ben Bowline," or at times plunging with one accord into the "Bay of Biscay.

At times, we come upon ballad-singing that has its plaintiveness; a pathos, independent of the words and air, though the ballad shall be sweetly sung. May such singing be seldom heard; may the passenger be rarely stopt, when hurrying on a winter's night homeward, by the low, sweet voice of some thinly-clad woman, hugging her child, for whom and it may be for others, her wretched minstrelsy is to buy a supper. We have heard such singing; and the tune of the minstrel, the intonation of the words told a tale of misery; declared that she had suffered many rubs of fortune; that she was not born to sing the requiem of her own lungs in November's fog and January's blast.

The respectable Ballad-Singer is our aversion: the impostor who, acting in broad day an overwhelming sense of his degradation, sings in strictest confidence to himself; or, whose fortissimo shall be no louder than that of a bee bumbling in a flower. He is, he will tell you, a most respectable tradesman, who has endured incalculable losses; and who, if you could really come to his secret history, would much rather try to sing than work. The true interests of balladsinging, as a picturesque calling, have been much injured by such varlets.

The Ballad-Singer who at watering-places carols to young ladies, and sings away the peace of families, is not to our purpose. He is beyond the minstrel of the gutter, and not quite up to the Apollo of a tea-gardens. Besides, there is a mystery about him which we care not to unravel. Heaven knows, he may be a Polish prince, and he may be only a runaway pin-maker

We have now no Ballad-Singers of character; no professed, constant minstrels, chanting their daily rounds, and growing grey, it may be, to one everlasting strain-to one untiring song. The knaves who now chirp in the highways are, like grasshoppers, but of a season; their music tarries not with us; their sweet voices pass from our memories with the air they die upon; they make no part of our household recollections, but are thankfully got rid of at the turning of the street. It was not always so. The reader must remember two or three Ballad-Singers of his youth, whose harmonies, rude or dulcet, still vibrate in his heart, and make a child of him again. For ourselves, we have two-nay, three favourites of the highway minstrelsy. It is but to name them, and if the reader be of London breeding, he needs must recognise the vocal wayfarers.

Our first acquaintance was an old blind man, familiarly named Billy. He had only one song: it was, however, recommended by a fiddle accompaniment. Billy's song-it had worn him into wrinkles

was,

"Oh! listen-listen to the voice of love!"

Billy had a rich falsetto. Billy knew it: hence, you could have sooner drawn him from his skin than make him quit his falsetto : for he would murmur, preludise a few low notes, then rush into it, and, once there, he knew too well his own strength to quit it on small occasion. Billy's falsetto was his fastness, where he capered and revelled in exulting security. We hear it now; yes, we listen to his "love" whooping through wintry darkness-proudly crowing above the din of the street-shouting triumphantly above the blast— a loud-voiced Cupid "horsing the wind." Was it a fine cunning on the part of the musician-we trust it was-that made him subdue into the lowest mutterings all the rest of the song, giving the whole of his falsetto, and with it all his enthusiasm, to the one word "love?" If this were art, it was art of the finest touch. Nor must we pass the fingering of his instrument: he would tuck his chin into his bosom, and smiling, now blandly now grimly on that soul-ravishing bit of wood, twitch and snatch and drag away its music with most potent and relentless hand more, he was so absorbed, so bound by his art, that if the fiddle had been suddenly displaced for a battledore, we believe that Billy would have bowed and fingered away all heedless of the change. Poor Billy! He had a sleek, happy, well-fed look ; and though we have known a worse falsetto than his ten thousand times better paid, we have a comfortable hope that it procured for him all the decencies of board and lodging. We have liked several Ballad-Singers; but Billy was a "first love."

Has the reader ever been startled by

"Philomel down in the grove,"

suddenly piped into his ear,-and, looking round, has he discovered an old, lean, withered woman, who-after some investigation-has proved to be the minstrel? Twenty years ago she sang that one song, and then it seemed the song of the swan-a dying strain: then she was age-stricken, and now— -we heard her not a month ago—she seems no older. We had lost her for some years, when one night,

"Philomel down in the grove,"

with its shrill charm, brought back scenes of boyhood. Its wailing,. melancholy sound was as the voice of departed years; the requiem of a hopeful time.

Can we close this paper, without one word to thee, O, William Waters? Blithest of blacks! Ethiopian Grimaldi! They who saw thee not, cannot conceive the amount of grace co-existent with a wooden leg--the comedy budding from timber. Then Billy's complexion! We never saw a black so black his face seemed polished, trickling with good humour. Who ever danced as he danced? Waters was a genius; his life gave warranty of it, nor did his death disprove it, for he died in a workhouse.

We would say one word on-not a Ballad-Singer, but an instrumental musician. If the reader be four-score-ten, he must, as a thing of his childhood, remember a little blind woman, with a face like a withered apple, who still plays upon the hurdy-gurdy. No man can tell the age of that minstrel; for she lives and grinds music at this very hour. There was a dark legend that, some years ago, she was an opera-singer-a prima donna of even more than professional caprice and arrogance,—and that, as a punishment, Apollo doomed her to the menial footing of pedestrian musician. The tale is in some measure borne out by the fact that she walks rapidly on, never pausing for the alms of the charitable, but turning, turning, eternally turning. It is said that this her punishment is to continue until opera-singers become not a whit more conceited or more arrogant than other people. If such be the case, God help that woman!

We close our paper with an anecdote of Bishop Corbet-all ought to know his cordial poems-who, when a doctor of divinity, one day at Abingdon heard a Ballad-Singer complain that he could not sell his ware. On which, the doctor donned the minstrel's leathern jacket, "went out into the street, and drew around him a crowd of admiring buyers."

PP

THE IRISH PEASANT.

BY SAMUEL LOVER.

In the present day, there is scarcely a subject more talked of or less understood than the Irish Peasant; not one that is the theme of fiercer debate, contradiction, and misrepresentation. His enemies representing him as a fiend, stimulate his friends to paint him as an angel, and the truth lies between-he is a man; and amongst many high qualities he possesses, that of manhood stands so boldly forward, that in describing him, his chronicler may say emphatically, "The Irish Peasant is a man."

And this is no small praise. The high-souled Rolla, when he speaks of the gallant Castilian soldier, conveys to Elvira his sense of admiration for him by using the very words—" That soldier, mark me, is a man!-all are not men that bear the human form:" and it is true; for such are the persecutors of the Irish Peasant, who, not content with crushing him to the lowest social condition, traduce whom they have rendered wretched; and, having robbed him of all else beside, would "filch from him his good name," and hunt him down the steep of infamy with a sanguinary instinct, more resembling hounds than men.

Englishmen sometimes receive false impressions of other people through superficial travellers, who, hurrying to their conclusions, as they do to their inns, post-haste, are therefore liable to many mistakes: but the false picture of the Irish Peasant is not the result of mistake, but intention. He it is alone who is designedly, habitually, and systematically maligned.

So much has this been the case, that his chronicler, who may start with the intention of being his eulogist, finds himself suddenly becoming an apologist. So often has the Irish Peasant been arraigned at the bar of public opinion, or, I may say, prejudice, that his best friend is forced rather to plead in his defence than to speak in his praise: instead of producing just impressions, obliged first to remove false ones. Truth may not walk abroad without first clearing away the rubbish with which Falsehood has blocked up her path.