The Irish folk-song, likewise, is very fine, but it has, on the whole, neither the flexible range nor the supreme sense of artistic fitness possessed by the Scotch. The dominant moods are two: one the lively dance spirit, represented by the Irish jigs and reels; and the other the richly sentimental and even tragic tone of the love songs. As it happens, Irish folk-song has undergone the same process as the Scotch in having a native poet supply in great abundance new words to the old tunes. The ‘Irish Melodies’ of Sir Thomas Moore are pretentious poems designed to supplant the homely words of the folk-poets. But if Burns escaped being ridiculous in his attempt to supply his native country with a new folk-art, Moore emphatically did not. Nothing could be more incongruous than his pompous poems with their dreary romantic paraphernalia of harps and fair ladies. As poems his lyrics have only the virtues of the drawing-room, a mellifluous flow of words and a certain sensuous grace. As folk-art they are a painful absurdity. They evoke abstractions and conventional poetic phrases where the popular genius goes unerringly to concrete fact. They have the dreary sameness of the second-rate talent where the folk-poetry has all the variety of the commonplace things of this world and of the ordinary people in it. Yet Moore’s words are in many instances firmly wedded to the music in the popular mind, and it is not likely that a divorce will ever be achieved. This is doubtless because, false as the poet was to the spirit of the music, he caught and persuasively stated the romantic sentimentality of the Celtic nature.