Hardly less fiery effusions as street songs,
intended more for the middle than the lower
classes, are John Banim's.

He said that he was not our brother,
The mongrel, he said what we knew;
No, Erin, our dear island mother,
He ne'er had his black blood from you.

We need scarcely say who the black-
blooded individual mentioned is, or plead
that, like another eminent personage not
unknown at Fenian meetings, he is scarcely
as black as he has been painted.  Doctor
Drennan's When Erin first Rose, though
revolutionary, is glowing with true poetry,
and would not have been unworthy even
of Campbell. It begins finely:

When Erin first rose from the dark swelling flood,
God bless'd the green island, and said it was good.
The emerald of Europe it sparkled and shone
In the ring of the world, the most precious stone;
In her sun, in her soil, in her station thrice blest,
With her back towards Britain, her face to the west,
Erin stands like a fortress upon her steep shore,
And strikes her high harp 'mid the ocean's deep roar.

A notice of Irish street songs would be
incomplete that did not treat of the
convivial as well as the patriotic songs.  High
in this class stand those two jovial reckless
lyrics, Garryowen, and the Rakes of
Mallow.  The first is very old; the most
lively verse runs:

We are the boys that delight in
Smashing the Limerick lamps when lighting,
Through the streets like porters fighting,
And tearing all before us.
Chorus:
Instead of spa we'll drink brown ale,
And pay the reckoning on the nail;
No man for debt shall go to jail,
From Garryowen in glory.

It is not easy to beat this song for tipsy
jollity and headlong Celtic "devilment," but
it must be confessed that in the Rakes of
Mallow the two first verses sound like the
bangs of a drunken man's shillaleh:

Beauing, belling, dancing, drinking,
Breaking windows, cursing, sinking,
Ever raking, never thinking,
Live the rakes of Mallow.

Spending faster than it comes,
Beating waiters, bailiffs, duns,
Bacchus' true-begotten sons,
Live the rakes of Mallow.

A better written and scarcely less famous
convivial song is, Bumper Squire Jones:
written by jovial Baron Dawson, a great
legal authority in his day, to Carolan's
air of Planxty Jones.  The great harper
and the baron were enjoying the somewhat
lavish hospitality of Squire Jones, at
Moneyglass, and slept in adjoining rooms;
the baron, who was both a wag and a poet,
hearing Carolan one night composing a
song in crippled English to the honour
of his host, wrote a set of fresh words,
and, remembering the air the next morning
at breakfast, sang the melody to his
own words, and accused the enraged bard
of piracy. The baron's song begins:

Ye good fellows all
Who love to be told where good claret's in store,
Attend to the call
Of one who's ne'er frighted,
But greatly delighted
With six bottles more:

and the verse ends with the refrain:

Then away with the claret- a bumper, Squire Jones.

This song smacks of the hard drinking
days of Squire Western. Mr. Crofton
Croker, in his pleasant collection of Irish
popular songs, classifies them under the
four national heads, St. Patrick, the
Potato, the Shamrock, and Whisky. The
capital old song:

Oh, St. Patrick was a gentleman,
Who came of dacent people-

was written by Messrs. Bennet and Toleken,
of Cork, and first sung by them, at a
masquerade, in 1814. The song was afterwards
lengthened for Webbe, the comedian,
who made it popular.

The finest song relating to the Shamrock,
is the Green little Shamrock of Ireland:
written by Cherry, the actor, for
Mrs. Mountain, who sang it in a monopolylogue
in the Little Opera House, Capel-street,
Dublin, in 1806.  The first verse is very
pretty and fervid:

There's a dear little plant that grows in our isle,
'Twas St. Patrick himself sure that set it,
And the sun of his labour with pleasure did smile,
And with dew from his eye often wet it.
It thrives through the bog, through the brake, through
the mireland.
And he called it the dear little shamrock of Ireland:
The sweet little shamrock, the dear little shamrock,
The sweet little, green little shamrock of Ireland.

The potato has not been sung of in any
very lasting verse.  Whisky has had, we
need hardly say, immemorable street lyrists.
One of the best of these songs is Love and
Whisky, written about 1760.  Mr. Croker
says it was "the most popular song in the
heyday of Irish volunteerism."  It is sung
to the lively tune of Bobbing Joan, and
runs in this sort of measure:

But love's jealous pang
In heart-ache oft we find it,
Whisky, in its turn,
A headache leaves behind it
* * * *