forcible-feeble in appeal, or, when they attempted to interpret the spirit of battle, rang false to the real feeling and knowledge of the soldier. To this there were brilliant exceptions, like Mr. Gibbons's We are coming, Father Abraham, Mr. Henry Howard Brownell's naval poems, and Read's Sheridan's Ride, but as a whole it must be confessed that the polite poetry of the civil war is rather dreary reading. There was an immense amount of song-writing as well as of song-singing during the war, and under the stress of excitement and the gathering together of immense bodies of young and exuberant spirits the enthusiasm inevitably found a vent through the lungs. The illiterate poets were as busy as those of higher education; and those who did not seek their public through the pages of the fashionable magazine, or even the poet's corner of the country newspaper, but through the badly printed sheet of the penny street ballad, or through the mouth of the negro minstrel, contributed almost as largely to the poetry of the war as their brothers. Dime song-books containing a curious admixture of the common and the polite, the appropriate and the incongruous, were innumerable, and the poetry which is below literary criticism was equal in bulk to that which is within its scope. Actual soldiers and sailors also sometimes wrote of their battles and experiences, or expressed their feelings in more or less finished verse, and these found their way into print either in the ballad sheet or the newspaper. Most of those which were good in themselves, from their native force and vigor or from their power as songs, have been preserved, but there is an immense amount of this uncollected and unedited verse which has a very great value as illustrating the sentiments and condition of the people, the waves of popular feeling during various phases of the war, the impressions of notable incidents and the estimates of prominent personages, and which tell, oftentimes more than the leading articles in the newspapers, how the common people were affected by the tremendous struggle. They have the interest, if no other, of the relics of arms and uniforms, and the tokens of the familiar life of a bygone age, and will one day be as valuable to the historian as the ballads of the civil war in England, which have been collected with so much care. In modern times and in civilized societies, the newspaper has taken the place of the street ballad as the record of historical events and the expression of political feeling, and Ireland is almost the only country where it now lingers in any quantity and force; but during such times of popular excitement, and the occurrence of great events involving the most intimate interests of the people, as during the civil war, the popular ballads resumed something of their former value as the expressions of popular feeling. It would be a mistake to omit from consideration even those which were provided as a matter of professional business by the