Though fine athletes and unsurpassed jumpers, they lacked the coolness, the patience, and faculty of co-operating so essential to success in cricket. From this absence of vigorous youth, there results a dearth of “play-boys”—_i.e._, jokers, merry fellows—which is not likely to be remedied in this generation. Even in former years, before the _entente cordiale_ between landlord and tenant had been so rudely severed, it struck us as a symptom of decadence—unless, may-be, it was a mere compliment to the “quality,”—that on all festive gatherings where gentle and simple met on a friendly footing, the singers as often as not chose for the delectation of their superiors some old popular music-hall song of six or seven seasons back, which had filtered down from London through the provinces to Dublin, and so slowly made its way into our remote district. Thus we have heard “The Grecian Bend” rendered with the richest brogue imaginable, which partly alleviated the Philistinism of the song. The Irish peasantry, it should be remarked, do not sing Moore's Irish melodies, with few exceptions, in spite of the charm of the airs to which the words are wedded, which is an adequate proof, if any were wanted, that he has no claim to be considered a national poet. Few readers realise that by far his finest work is in the domain of satire, on which his title to immortality is far more securely based than on his erotic dactyls. Nor do the peasants, as a rule, know much of Lover, whose amusing ballads have a great and well-merited popularity in the middle and upper classes of Irish society. The reason of this is, perhaps, to be found in the character of the music, generally Lover's own, which is a sort of compromise between an Irish melody of the flowing type and the modern drawing-room ballad. Genuine Irish music is a barbarous thing enough—a wild, nasal chant, freely embellished with trills and turns—and to this setting the peasantry in the outlying districts still sing a good many songs in Irish or in English, in the latter case generally translations. To this must be added a certain number of ballads which trace their source to the events of the last few years. Nothing can be gained from an attempt to write down the Land League from a literary point of view, and we are very far from harboring such an intention. But these songs are, in the main, dreary and abusive, as one might naturally expect, for the events of recent years have not been conducive to mirth in Ireland. Here is a fragment from one on the landlords of Ireland:—