Love and whisky's joys,
Let us gaily twist 'em,
In the thread of life,
Faith, we can't resist 'em.

Our notice of Irish street songs would
be incomplete if we forgot to allude to
those wonderful specimens of the mad
pedantry of Irish hedge schoolmasters, so
admirably ridiculed in The Groves of
Blarney, a parody which the elder Mathews
helped to make famous.  An itinerant bard
had composed a song in praise of Castle
Hyde, for which, to his disgust, he was
driven from the door by the enraged
proprietor.  At a party soon afterwards,
Mr. Millikin, a Cork poet, undertook to produce
a song equal, if not superior, in absurdity.
Accordingly, borrowing the tune, he went
home and produced The Groves of Blarney.
The lines—

There's gravel walks there for speculation,
And conversation in sweet solitude,
'Tis there the lover may hear the dove or
The gentle plover in the afternoon-

are exactly in the manner of a hedge poet,
and still better is the verse beginning,

There's statues gracing the noble place in
All heathen goddesses so fair,
Bold Neptune, Plutarch, and Nicodemus,
All standing naked in the open air.

The verse on the Blarney Stone:

There is the stone there that whoever kisses,
Oh, he never misses to grow eloquent,

was added by Father Prout.
The Dublin street songs of the old time
were sometimes ferocious, and sometimes
insipidly sentimental.  Of the thieves' songs
one of the most savagely horrible is Luke
Caffrey's Kilmainham Minuet.  (Another
name for the death struggle on the gallows.)
The writer describes in soft Dublin slang
the efforts of thieves to restore consciousness
in a felon who had been hung.

A still more famous Dublin street song
was, The Night before Larry was Stretched,
the authorship of which has been attributed
to Curran, Lysaght, and Dean Burrowes,
of Cork, but is now supposed to have
been really written by "Hurlfoot Bill,"
a man who kept a cloth shop at Waterford.
Larry was a half paralysed thief named
Lambert, who, at once ferocious and
cowardly, always counselled murdering those
whom his gang robbed. Kicking and
fighting, he was dragged by a rope to the
place of execution.  In the song Larry's
companions are supposed to visit him in
the condemned cell on the last night of his
life, and play at cards with him on the
lid of his coffin.  Larry is by no means
dismayed, and has spirit enough left to
knock down a man who cheats, and to
throw away the chaplain's wig.

Early in June will be published, price 5s. 6d., bound in
green cloth,
THE THIRD VOLUME
OF THE NEW SERIES OF
ALL THE YEAR ROUND.
To be had of all Booksellers.

The FOURTH VOLUME will be commenced on Saturday,
June 4, with a New Serial Story, entitled,
THE DOCTOR'S MIXTURE,
Which will be continued from week to week until
completed.

A Short Serial Story will also be commenced in the First
Number of the New Volume, entitled,
IN THAT STATE OF LIFE.
And will be continued from week to week until
completed.

MR. DICKENS'S NEW WORK.
Just Published, PRICE ONE SHILLING,
PART TWO OF
THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD.
BY CHARLES DICKENS.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY S. L. PILDES.
To be Completed in TWELVE MONTHLY Numbers,
uniform with the Original Editions of " PICKWICK"
and " COPPERFIELD."
London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, Piccadilly.

END OF THE THE THIRD VOLUME.