IRISH LOVE AND LAUGHTER.

TT is hardly wonderful that Englishmen fail to comprehend 1 Irishmen. Few races comprehend their enemies ; and it is the Irish who are enemies whom Englishmen study, rather

than the entire people, which is not so much hostile to England as censorious and suspicions about England, full of the jealousy with which unprosperous cousins regardtheir too successful kins- mien. Even, however, were the two peoples friends, we question if they.would ever quite understand each other,—the real reason why men and women can so constantly be lovers, but, unless united by close ties of blood, so seldom comrade-friends. How are Englishmen, indeed, with their fixed ideas, to understand a people who, while always looking back to the past, are always utopians in idea ; who are among the most humorous and the

most gloomy of mankind ; who are as recklesS as boys and as rugs as old men ; who never in their wildest moments lose

sight of "interests," and never in their soberest moods are quite free from bedevilment; who positively enjoy self-pity, yet are keenly sensitive to any remark which trenches on their dignity; who have, as a people, no care for beauty or grace of surround- ings, and will live in voluntary squalor rather than take trouble on behalf of external refinement, yet who exhibit perpetually in their lives, their literature, and their likings, an inborn susceptibility to grace and fancy, like that of a race of artists ?

How is an Englishman to understand, for example, the kind of emotion which prompts so many Irish love-songs—the half adoring, half quizzing, half devoted, half self-ridiculing emotion which shines out in so many of them. We have just looked through a collection of such songs, forming the first part of,Mr. Graves's collection of "Songs of Irish-Wit and Humour," which, but for them, would be a poor one—the political songs . are badly chosen, without a trace of true Irish fire, and some. of the drinking-songs would discredit Dutchmen—but which for the sake of the love-ditties all lovers of poetry will do well to keep. They are by many hands, some known, some unknown, and of all kinds and degrees of merit; but they all have one pecu- liarity. Without an exception, they are pervaded by a spirit which, so far as we know, we could not find in any English Iove- songs whatever,—a spirit of graceful and, to our minds; charm-

ing playfulness, so expressed that you never doubt for a moment that the light, sometimes even derisive, words cover an -affec-

tionateness—not a passion, mind—so deep, that but for the laugh, it might give way in tears. English poets have many moods in their love-songs, but not, we think, exactly this one,—not this anion of sincere feeling, sometimes even of worshipping feeling, with an inner sense of a certain comedy in the situation, as if the poet would not suffer himself to be quite serious. .We could produce from English collections specimens burning with passion, alive with worship, saturated with affection- ateness, fall of longing, of rapture, or of that melancholy " want," that sense of something missing and never to be replaced, which is the distinctive note of the English poetry of love. But for the special tone of these Irish songs, this love-making by a man who is dancing the while, yet in dancing is full of the wish to win his love, and fearful lest in his highest jumps he should ever cease

to seem as admiring as he feels, we- should, we fear, in English poetry look in vain. We cannot- remember a man who could have written them, for even Suckling would have lapsed into mere gravity, and Herrick have made his utterance less spon- taneous; while both, though they might-have made their words smile, would have lacked the power to make the laugh heard

which accompanies some of these songs. Take this one, for instance, by Lover. The man who made that is consciously laughing at hfmself all the while, yet all the while is as earnest as if he were gravity itself :—

"Oh, I'm not myself at all, -

Molly dear, Molly dear, I'm not myself at all. Nothin' carin', flotilla' knowing', 'Tie afther you I'm goin', Faith, your shadow 'tie I'm growin', Molly dear, And I'm not myself at all !

Th' other day.I went confessin', And I ask'd the father's blessin' ; 'But,' says I, 'don't give me one intirely, For I fretted so last year But the half o' me is here, So give the other half to Molly Brierly.

, Oh! I'm not myself at all !

Oh, my shadow on the wall, Molly dear, Molly dear, Isn't like myself at all.

For I've got so very thin, Myself says 'tisn't him, But that party girl so slim, Molly dear,

And I'm not myself at all !

If thus I smaller grew, All fretting, dear, for you, 'Tie you should make me up the deficiency.

So just let Father Taaff • Make you my betther half, And you will not the worse for the addition be— Oh, I'm not myself at all !.

I'll be not myself at all, Molly dear, Molly dear, Till you my own I call ! Since a change o'er me there came • Sure you might change your name— And 'twould just come to the same, Molly dear, 'Twonld-just come to the same : For if you and I were one; All oonfnsion would be gone, And 'twould simplify the matter intirely ;• And 'twould save us so much bother,

When we'd both be one another— Bo listen now to rayson, Molly Brierly ;

Oh, I'm not myself at all !" •

Will any man 'say that, apart from the music, the meaning of that song would go home to any average English audience P They would laugh, maybe, though not very heartily; but would they catch the cry in it P And how many Englishmen would feel sympathy with the. extravagance in the really wonderful line we have italicised, in which Mr. Allingham tries to describe the rhythmical-grace of his mistress's dancing,—a line which none but an Irishman could have written ?—

" The dance o' last Whit-Monday night exceeded all before': No pretty girl for miles about was missing from the floor; But Mary kept the belt of love, and oh, but she was gay !- She danced a jig, she sung a song, that.took my heart away.

When she stood up for dancing, her steps were so complete, The music nearly killed itself to listen to her feet; The fiddler moaned his blindness, he heard her so much praised ; But blessed himself he wasn't deaf when once her voice she raised."

Or, to take a still better one, by Mr. Graves himself, in which the laughter is almost restrained into a smile, and-which there- fore comes nearer to English taste and comprehension without effort: This is part of " Nancy, the Pride of the West" "Have you heard Nancy sigh ? then you've caught the sad echo, From the wind-harp enchantingly borne. .

Have you heard the, girl laugh ? then you've heard the first cuckoo ..

Chant summer's delightful return. And the songs that poor ignorant country-folk fanny, The lark's liquid raptures on high, Are just old Irish airs from the sweet lips of Nancy, • • Flowing up and refreshing the sky.

And though her foot dances so soft from the heather To the dew-twinkling tussocks of grass, It but warns the bright drops to slip 'closer together To image the exquisite lass ; We've no men left among us, so lost to emotion, Or scornful, or cold to her sex, Who'd resist her, if Nancy once took up the notion To set that soft foot on their necks.

Yet, for all that the bee flies for honey-dew fragrant To the half-opened flower of her lips; And the butterfly pauses, the purple-eyed vagrant, To play with her pink finger-tips; From all human lovers she locks up the treasure ' A thousand are starving to taste, .

And the fairies alone know the magical measure Of the ravishing round of her waist." •

There is a ring of merriment in that as well as of feeling, of fun as well as of passionate admiration and longing, to which we cannot readily quote an English parallel. These songs are all made for the people, and have been caught by the people; and what must there be that none of us perceive in the' people to whom they are so pleasant, what that is utterly at variance with the other side of Irishmen so constantly presented to the Saxon P How is it that the men who by preference wish love to be expressed with this note in it, with this tone of sweet, graceful humour bursting now and again—as in the. two lines. we have marked—into open laughter, not unconscious of posi- tive absurdity, are in malice so sullen and black, and, as Eng- lishmen feel, so unreasonable P It is all the stranger, that laugh, because, though Irish .prose is often witty, the laugh is seldom heard in it, any more than it is in Irish oratory, which, though far more poetical, is usually quite as grave in meaning as English eloquence. We never read the lighter poetry of Ireland, however slight, without fancying that somehow an elf and a peasant have been bound up in one form ; and perhaps after all that is true, and it is through a certain doubleness of nature produced by centuries of a double life—the true life passed at home, the other life lived before the stranger—that an Irishman

eludes the Englishman's comprehension. The latter, consciously or unconsciously, thinkfrall men not only are but should be single- natured—whence part of his rather Philistine admiration for consistency—and when he discovers a man who is not so, recoils, half in fear andhalf in a kind of contempt, both of them feel- ings fatal to mutual intelligence.