oath I ever took, and the hesitation was, I think, natural.” *

I was now dismissed without any further questioning; and, however trying had been this short operation, was amply repaid for it by the kind zeal with which my young friends and companions flocked to congratulate me;-not

*For the correctness of the above report of this short examination, I can pretty confidently answer. It may amuse, therefore, my readers, as showing the manner in which biographers make the most of small facts, - to see an extract or two from another account of this affair, published not many years since by an old and zealous friend of our family. After stating with tolerable correctness one or two of my answers, the writer thus proceeds: -" Upon this, Lord Clare repeated the question, and young Moore made such an appeal, as caused his lordship to relax, austere and rigid as he was. The words I cannot exactly remember; the substance was as follows: — that he entered college to receive the education of a scholar and a gentleman; that he knew not how to compromise these characters by informing against his college companions; that his own speeches in the debating society had been ill construed, when the worst that could be said of them was, if truth had been spoken, that they were patriotic . . . . that he was aware of the high-minded nobleman he had the honour of appealing to, and if his lordship could for a moment condescend to step from his high station and place himself in his situation, then say how he would act under such circumstances,—it would be his guidance. -HERBERT'S Irish Varieties. London, 1836.

so much, I was inclined to hope, on my acquittal by the court, as on the manner in which I had acquitted myself. Of my reception, on returning home, after the fears entertained of so very different a result, I will not attempt any description; it was all that such a home alone

could furnish.

I have been induced thus to continue down to the very verge of the warning outbreak of 1798, the slight sketch of my early days which I ventured to commence in the First Volume of this Collection: nor could I have furnished the Irish Melodies with any more pregnant illustration, as it was in those times, and among the events then stirring, that the feeling which afterwards found a voice in my country's music, was born and nurtured.

I shall now string together such detached notices and memoranda respecting this work, as I think may be likely to interest my readers.

Of the few songs written with a concealed political feeling, such as "When he who

adores thee," and one or two more, the most successful, in its day, was "When first I met thee warm and young," which alluded, in its hidden sense, to the Prince Regent's desertion of his political friends. It was little less, I own, than profanation to disturb the sentiment of so beautiful an air by any connexion with such a subject. The great success of this song, soon after I wrote it, among a large party staying at Chatsworth, is thus alluded to in one of Lord Byron's letters to me : "I have heard from London that you have left Chatsworth and all there full of entusymusy

and, in particular, that 'When first I met thee' has been quite overwhelming in its effect. I told you it was one of the best things you ever wrote, though that dog wanted

you to omit part of it.”

It has been sometimes supposed that "Oh, breathe not his name," was meant to allude to Lord Edward Fitzgerald: but this is a mistake; the song having been suggested by the well

known passage in Robert Emmet's dying speech," Let no man write my epitaph

...

let my tomb remain uninscribed, till other times and other men shall learn to do justice to my memory."

The feeble attempt to commemorate the glory of our great Duke-"When History's Muse," &c. is in so far remarkable, that it made up amply for its want of poetical spirit, by an outpouring, rarely granted to bards in these days, of the spirit of prophecy. It was in the year 1815 that the following lines first made their appearance:

And still the last crown of thy toils is remaining,
The grandest, the purest, ev'n thou hast yet known;
Though proud was thy task, other nations unchaining,
Far prouder to heal the deep wounds of thy own.
At the foot of that throne, for whose weal thou hast stood,
Go, plead for the land that first cradled thy fame, &c.

About fourteen years after these lines were written, the Duke of Wellington recommended to the throne the great measure of Catholic Emancipation.

The fancy of the "Origin of the Irish Harp," was (as I have elsewhere acknowledged *) suggested, by a drawing made under peculiarly painful circumstances, by the friend so often mentioned in this sketch, Edward Hud

son.

In connexion with another of these matchless airs, one that defies all poetry to do it justice, -I find the following singular and touching statement in an article of the Quarterly Review. Speaking of a young and promising poetess, Lucretia Davidson, who died very early from nervous excitement, the Reviewer says, "She

* "When, in consequence of the compact entered into between government and the chief leaders of the conspiracy, the State Prisoners, before proceeding into exile, were allowed to see their friends, I paid a visit to Edward Hudson, in the jail of Kilmainham, where he had then lain immured for four or five months, hearing of friend after friend being led out to death, and expecting every week his own turn to come. I found that to amuse his solitude he had made a large drawing with charcoal on the wall of his prison, representing that fancied origin of the Irish Harp which, some years after, I adopted as the subject of one of the Melodies.' - Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, vol. i.

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