then he has the same privilege with their productions, so that it is all right in the long run. The ballads are printed on the coarsest of paper with the poorest of type, and generally with a worn-out woodcut of the most inappropriate description at the head. Thus, for instance, I have one, where a portrait of Jerome Bonaparte does duty over the "Lamentation of Lawrence King for the murder of Lieut. Clutterbuck." The ballad-singers are of both sexes, and are very dilapidated specimens. The tone in which they send their voices on the shuddering air is utterly indescribable--a sort of droning, _pillelu_ falsetto, at once outrageously comical and lugubrious. They sing everything in the same melancholy cadence, whether lamentation or love-song. Very often, two, more especially of women, will be together. {33} The first will sing the first two lines of a quatrain alone, and then the second will join in, and they rise to the height of discord together. Fair-days are their days of harvest, although in cities like Cork or Waterford they may be seen on every day except Sunday. A popular ballad will often have a very large sale, and will find its way all over the country. The greater portion of ballads composed in this way are, of course, destitute of anything like poetry--mere pieces of outrageous metaphor and Malapropoian long words, for which last the ballad-singers have a ridiculous fondness. The singers sing in a foreign language; they have lost the sweet tongue peculiarly fitted for improvised poetry, in which their predecessors the bards, down to the date of less than one hundred years ago, sang so sweetly and so strongly, with such dramatic diction and happy boldness of epithet. The language of the Saxon oppressor is from the tongue, and not from the heart. As the mother of the late William Carleton used to say, "the Irish _melts into the tune_;" the English doesn't, and so many of the finest of the ancient melodies are now songs without words. "Turlogh O'Carolan," "Donogh MacConmara," and the "Mangaire Sugach" have not left their successors among the "English" poets of the present day. Among a people naturally so eloquent as the native Irish, not even the drapery of an incongruous language can entirely obscure the native vigor and strength of thought. A ballad is sometime seen which, though often unequal and rude, is alive with impassioned poetry, fierce, melancholy, or tender, and it almost always becomes a general favorite, and is preserved beyond its day to become a part of the standard stock. The songs of so genuine a poet as William Allingham, who is the only cultivated Irish poet who has had the taste and the spirit to reproduce in spirit and diction these wild flowers of song, have been printed on the half-penny ballad-sheets, and sung at the evening hearth and at the morning milking all over Ireland. "Lovely Mary Donnelly" and the "Irish Girl's Lamentation" have become, in truth, a part of the songs of the nation, touching