I believe the surest mode of reviving your friendship for an object that, God knows, has very unconsciously forfeited it, is to tell you that you can be of some service to her. The foregoing page will tell you how I am at present employed, having engaged with Phillips to have the work* finished by the ensuing month. I left England sooner than I intended, merely to collect those materials and documents which were only to be had in the interior parts of Ireland, especially Connaught, where I have been among my own relations for some time. I have, however, now re-

* The Wild Irish Girl.

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tired hither these two months back, “the world forgetting,” though I hope not, “by the world forgot.” I see no human being, write eight hours a day, sometimes more, and shall be ready for another venture to London by the first week in February. The favour I have to request of you is this: I am told you know Mr. Walker, and that he has written an account of Irish music and Irish bards. In my little work I have treated on both; but after the most diligent research I cannot gain any certain information relative to the Irish harp. I have read all that has been written on the subject by historians and antiquaries; but nothing on that subject by a musician. I know its construction and form; but what I want to know and what perhaps Mr. Walker can tell you, is the musical system of the instrument; by what rule it was tuned, how the change of keys was produced, and whether it was susceptible of chromatics? This, my dear Madam, is giving you a great deal of trouble, but as it affords you an opportunity of serving another, I am sure it is also giving you some pleasure.

Have you seen my Novice of St. Dominic? I long much to hear your opinion of it, that is if you shall think it worth one. Pratt, the author, has written to me, for leave to select the best passages from that and St. Clair, and to publish them in a work called The Morality of English Novels. This is very flattering, and this you will say, “is all the egotism of authorship,” and so it is; but before I check the dear theme, I must tell you that my Irish melodies are doing wonders in London, and that I have published a song

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at Holden’s, Parliament Street, dedicated to Lady Charlotte Homan, which I wish you much to see and hear.

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With Mr. Burton’s publication, I am but slightly acquainted. I think, however, with you, that the Preface was contributed by the Bishop of Clonfurt. It was his Lordship who first mentioned the publication to me. He spoke with approbation of the Collection of Airs.

I am rejoiced to find that Carolan’s harp is preserved.

You are now in a part of the island where many of the Finian tales are familiarly known. You will, of course, collect some of them, and, perhaps, interweave them with the work on which you are at present employed. If you could obtain faithful descriptions of some of the scenes of those tales, you would heighten the interest of your romance by occasionally introducing them. On the summit of Slieve Guillen, lies the scene of The Chase, which has been so admirably translated by Miss Brooke. As it does not appear from your letter, that you are acquainted with her Reliques, permit me to recommend that inestimable work to your particular attention. Benham, the printer, in Great George’s Street, South, is in possession

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of a few copies. When I shall hear of your arrival in Dublin, my bards shall mid their way to you.

With the plan of your work I am unacquainted. Perhaps you have taken for a model, the prose romance of the Irish, which was, I believe, generally interspersed with poetical pieces, like the Spanish romance (see Percy’s Reliques for an account of the History of the Civil Wars of Granada) or, to refer to a modern production, The Mysteries of Udolpho.

I am happy to find that you still enjoy the protection of your father. He must be a comfort to you, while you are a blessing to him. Be so good as to remember me to him with great kindness; and believe me,

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Your letter is precisely ten minutes in my possession, and while dear papa is playing away, on an old Cremona, some fine old Irish airs, and a young musician, at the corner of my writing-table, is taking down the melody, here am I, with my poor whirlgig brain full of basses, trebles, and accompaniments, and my warm, impulsive heart, full of the most respected object of its friendship, scribbling away to her as fast as I can, and humming “Shelah na Conolan,” while papa plays and little Orpheus writes. Apropos of

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these national airs, so tastelessly and so shamefully neglected, I am endeavouring to collect some of the best and least-known, and to put English words of my own to their wild and plaintive strains, and I am taking them down from my father, in preference to any one else, because he plays and sings them in the true attic style of Conomarra, and I really believe is more à porté to the idiomatic delicacies of Irish music than any man living, besides having the best and most original collection of airs. There are three or four (to which I have adapted words) universally known, though never sung in the true strains of Irish musical sentiment, and to which words had been put so vulgar and barbarous as to throw an air of ridicule over the whole. Of these are the “Cooleen,” whose date could not be ascertained in the reign of Henry the Eighth, “Savourneen Deelish,” “My lodgings on the cold ground;” the words of the latter, however, have a simplicity which I am sure mine will want, though I have endeavoured to imitate them. Have you heard “Shelah na Conolan,” an air that breathes the very spirit of pathos; “Kathleen O’Tyrell,” playfully arch; “One touch of her finger would do your heart good;” one of the same character “Drimadu,” heart-breaking and wild, and “Grace Nugent,” whose melody is tinctured with Italian elegance, and is the best of Carolan’s love songs; by way of experiment, I put Italian words to “Planxy Power,” which is itself truly Italian, and having sung it, con amore for one of our rustic amateurs, they acknowledged it at once to be one of Sarti’s soul-dissolving airs, especially as it

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was written on the same page with “Lungi.” Now, whether it is in my national enthusiasm or my national prejudice, or call it what you will, I really believe this country to have a music more original, more purely its own, more characteristic, and possessing more, the soul of melody, than any other country in Europe. The Italians, who now give the key-note to the music of every other country, have, in my opinion, none of their own. Their’s is the music of science. I have at this moment by me about a hundred and fifty ancient and modern Italian ballads, as sung by the Venetian gondolieri, and by the Roman and Tuscan peasantry, and if the character of national music is anywhere to be found, it must be in those airs, breathed in the “native wood-notes wild” of the natural and unscientific musician. But in these wretched ariettes there is only a monotonous recitative strain without melody, and incapable of being harmonized before the modern scale of music was given to Europe by the monk Guy Aretin; the sweet airs of my native country were as conformable to the laws of modern compositions, as the Iliad of Homer to the rules of criticism before Aristotle drew up his fundamental rules for forming an epic poem; besides that, then and ever, they breathed the sweetest intonations of the passions of the heart, and so now I have beat the Italians out of the field, and my triumph is complete, and there is no more to be said about the matter, only give me your applause! Oh, but there, I intended all this letter should be about a sarsenet mantle and knowing little hoods, which give one that delightful disin-

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voltura air I love so much; but then papa’s violin is ringing in my ears, and then, like other wandering luminaries, I keep moving in my own sphere by the power of harmony (for music is my sphere, and I believe that philosophy is a little obsolete); but no matter, it answers my purpose just now as well as the Copernican or Newtonian systems combined. Pray do you observe, I have given an armistice to my “Il Penseroso” mood, and my good spirits hold an armed neutrality between my real and my fancied sorrow, and that though I am “most musical,” I am not “most melancholy,” and that, in short, I am restored to my usual bizarre random tone of mind. Oh, but Gresset, from whom you quote the happiest lines of his happiest poem—I never could get a full feast of that charming writer, but only at intervals snatched a little bonne bouche that incited my appetite without satisfying it. I adore those socializing poetic powers that smile in his social and familiar works. His patriotic ode is very fine; his Merchant is equal to anything of Moliere’s, and there is a sentiment in his ode, “Au Roi,” which ought to be written in letters of gold. “Le cri d’un peuple heureux est la seule eloquence qui sache parler aux Rois.”

As I have not unpacked my books nor music, nor shall do so whilst here, I have been thrown upon the rational resources of painting watch papers, and rifling the riches of a circulating library. There is a fine romance by a fine scholar of Cambridge, where an Italian lady, in a glowing Italian summer evening, who (after a day’s travel in Italian scenery) goes into

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an Italian inn, and calls for a good fire and a hot supper. This, and a thousand other little incongruities observed in the stuff I have been reading, convinces me of the truth of Walpole’s assertions—that even to write a novel requires a considerable portion of general information, knowledge, and intelligence, besides talent—not that any of these requisites were necessary to show my poor author that a bower, al fresco, would have been more grateful to his fair traveller than the kitchen comforts of an English inn, besides making his heroine talk of a pounded cow in the 13th century, and in Florence. Pray ask your learned Domine, Tom, if they pounded cows in those days in Italy, or whether it was not introduced in a later age by some tyrant English farmer. The name of this intemperate work is Isabel, and you can have a thousand such for sixpence per work, that have gone through three or four editions, which shows that the fools carry it all to nothing in the present day; for my part I know not what the destiny of my bagatelle may be, for like La Chossel, “Je n’ai pas entrepris de plaire à tons les sots.” Now tell me, in your next, you are well, and then I promise you you shall have no more voluminous farragoes of this kind, for you may perceive I am acting up to Moliere’s definition of a physician, “Un qui conte des fabrioles dans les chambres des malades,” and am I not at this moment in your little boudoir prattling away to you, as I hope soon to do. I envy you the society of Mrs. Holman.

The Novice did not meet with due notice at first, owing to the bad season of its appearance.

I assure you that I am exceedingly well pleased with the Novice, and a second edition will be wanted by the time the new work is launched.

I am favoured with your letter of the 8th, and as you wish for a more explicit declaration of terms, I hereby agree to give you three hundred pounds, British, for the copyright of your work, entitled the Wild Irish Girl, on condition that it make three large volumes in duodecimo. With respect to a farther consideration, I would not advise you to look for it—in my own experience I have not had an instance,

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when, after giving such a price, even liberality required it. After you are perfectly satisfied with the copy, or, to speak more properly, satisfied that you can make it no better, it will be well to send it, by post if possible to get it franked, as the season is far advanced, to, madam,

I write (in the greatest haste) to say, that agreeably to your proposal of my meeting the overture of a lady—a young and beautiful lady, one with whom I have been long enraptured—I will give two hundred pounds for the Wild Irish Girl, now, and fifty pounds on the publication of the second and the third editions respectively.

When I wrote my first of the two letters I thought we had sold but six hundred and fifty copies of the Novice, and I then found we had sold seven hundred and ten, my stock-keeper having mistaken.

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It provokes me that a foolish spirit of revenge and retaliation in Mr. Johnson, owing to my giving Mr. Carr five hundred pounds for his Northern Summer, for which he had offered but one hundred pounds, should have stimulated him to step between you and me, and give so monstrous a price for a work which he has not seen, on a first application; a species of work, too, wholly out of his line of publication.

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In the first emotions, after receiving your letters, Cherry happening to call at the very instant, I resolved to outbid Johnson, though I might give five hundred pounds; some further consideration of the subject, has however, resolved me not to alter my last offer of two hundred pounds, to be drawn for in any way convenient to yourself, and fifty pounds per future edition after the first of fifteen hundred copies, which will little more than repay the two hundred pounds.

A little calculation (my favourite theme) may satisfy you that I made you a fair offer; and Johnson might as well have given you three thousand pounds as three hundred pounds, stimulated as he is by pique and a spirit of revenge.

The letter of Mr. Cherry must, therefore, be considered as nothing. I shall be glad to receive the re-

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vised copy of the Novice of St. Dominic as soon as possible, because it is likely that my little Irish Girl may give new vogue to her elder sister.

I say this in perfect good humour, being stimulated to write by something which has passed to-day from a

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well-wisher of mine, and friend of yours—Mr. Atkinson. Believe me

Not able to part from you, I have promised your noble and magnanimous friend, Atkinson, the three hundred pounds. His appeal was irresistible, and the Wild Irish Girl is mine, to do with her as I please!

You were too rapid about the Novice. Had her sister gone to Johnson he must have fathered the Novice, also, and have answered your drafts in her favour.

If you know any poor bard—a real one, no pretender—I will give him a guinea a page for his rhymes in the Monthly Magazine. I will also give for prose communications after the rate of six guineas per sheet. Your attention to this will oblige me, and may serve some worthy geniuses.