which real words contain for real musicians, has
never been more clearly exemplified than by
Shakopeare's unparagoned lyric. Among the
many settings of it which could be named, few
or none are positively bad; for the most part,
they are the best efforts of their writers. It is
the best number in William Linley's weak yet
well-intentioned Collection of Shakespeare songs.
It is the best of Bishop's four duets devoted
to Shakespeare's verse, the other three being,
"As it fell upon a day," "On a day," and "Say
though you strive to steal yourself away."
Mention has already been made here (when
Shakespeare music was under treatment) of the
grace and felicity with which it was mated with
sound by Miss Gabriel. But the last and the
best treatment of it is that by Mr. A. S. Sullivan
—a song to be placed beside, and with, the
best songs of Schubert, and Mendelssohn, and
Lindblad, and Gounod, and Gordigiani, which
have won a European reputation. There is
nothing of its kind (to speak advisedly) better
in the library of singers' music.

What a fist of strange songs about singing
comes back—like a masquerade procession-tune
—as we think of this branch of the subject!
Our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers,
in the days of Vauxhall, and Ranelagh, and
Mrs. Cornely's Rooms, sometimes enjoyed a
very odd minstrelsy. Does anybody, save the
writer, recollect the precious ditty which begins
as follows?—

         In a jessamine bower,
         While the bean was in flower,
              And zephyrs waved odours around,
         Lovely Sylvia was set,
         With her song and spinnet,
              To enchant the whole grove with the sound!

—and in "Bickham's Musical Entertainer"
(becoming a scarce book, because of the
luxurious manner in which the music was engraved,
every song garnished by a careful copper-plate
frontispiece, after the designs of men no less
than Watteau, Boucher, Lancret, and others of
"the Genteel Painters") Lovely Sylvia and her
spinnet were pictured as described by the
rhymster; birds hovering above her head, and
perfectly bare arms, and herself attitudinising
in a state of inane ecstacy most delightful to see.

As we approach our own time, we shall find
something far better than "Lovely Sylvia" in
the library of songs about singers. One of the
most remarkable of those to be named is the
adaptation by Moore of the rollicking Irish
melody, "Loony Mactwolter," to the praise of
song. The ease and grace with which a stiff
tune can be made flexible—the elegance and
freedom of versification in by no means an easy
rhythm—were never more consummately
displayed by this accomplished lyrist than here.
The words are as fluent as the smoothest piece
of Italian namby-pamby. Yet every word aids
the meaning.

          Sing, sing: Music was given
       To brighten the gay, and to kindle the loving;
          Souls here, like planets in heaven
        By Harmony's laws are alone kept moving.

Such a lyric as this, with a syllable to every
note, may be appealed to when we are assured, as
not unfrequently happens, by the pert and
pedantic, whom the gods have not made
poetical, that our mother tongue is unmanageable
for music. A greater fallacy was never
propounded. Then, a word is due to Byron's
"Beauty's Daughters," set by "single-song''
Knapton of York—one of the best examples of
a rondo that could be cited: and noticeable as
the solitary specimen from its writer's hand
which is current.

No one wrote with more passionate and
voluptuous eloquence of Music than Shelley.
There are no songs which have been oftener set
than his, and yet there is not one which holds its
ground as a piece of music. The poet's wealth
of imagery and involved phraseology distance all
exercise and assistance of the sister art, whose
function it is to clothe and complete. Shelley's
songs are set by the luxurious music of their own
verbal euphony. But enough of a subject the
exhaustion of which is, as has been said, simply
impossible. The above paragraphs will suggest
to every one caring for the matter a myriad of
specimens in which Music (Poetry aiding) has
put herself forth to illustrate the glory, the
beauty, and the charm of Music.

OLD STORIES RE-TOLD.

RESURRECTION MEN.        BURKE AND HARE.

FOR several days in the summer of 1829, a
certain committee-room of the House of
Commons, as well as all the passages leading to it,
were thronged by some of the strangest and
vilest beings that have perhaps ever visited
such respectable places. Sallow, cadaverous,
gaunt men, dressed in greasy moleskin or rusty
black, and wearing wisps of dirty white
handkerchiefs round their wizen necks. They had
the air of wicked sextons, or thievish grave-
diggers; there was a suspicion of degraded
clergymen about them, mingled with a dash of
Whitechapel costermonger. Their ghoulish faces
were rendered horrible by smirks of self-satisfied
cunning, and their eyes squinted with sidelong
suspicion, fear, and distrust.

These were resurrection-men, vampires who
earned their bread in a horrible way by digging
up newly-interred bodies in the churchyards of
London and its suburbs, and selling then for
dissection. They had been raked together from their
favourite house of call, The Fortune of War in
Smithfield. There were terrible rumours that
when "subjects" ran short, they had a way
of making dead bodies. The most eminent of
them was Izzy, a Jew, who bought bodies
of sextons, and sold dead people's teeth to
dentists. He was at last transported for a highway
robbery. The evidence of these ghouls will
best explain their habits. One of them deposed
that, in one year alone, he had sold one
hundred bodies. The most he had ever obtained had
been twenty-three in four nights. There were,
he said, about fifty resurrection-men in London;