Two ladies with military tastes, and no less
than five with ungovernable nautical propensities
—in other words, female soldiers and
sailors—are commemorated in our bundle.
The narrative of "The Undaunted Female"
describes how young Mary, who was a damsel
fair, so virtuous and so Kind, enlisted in the
regiment with her lover, and how

They fought them on the Sutlej till the Indians did
        give o'er,
Did Mary and her William in the late Indian war.

We may here take an opportunity of quoting
from another ballad, a singularly condensed
and simple statement of the tender feelings of
a young lady whose lover is a military gentleman:—

        When I do awake in the morning,
             My breast it does tremble with woe;
        To think that a youth who's so charming,
             Has such dangerous places to go.

The last verse of "The Handsome Cabin
Boy" contains a remarkable passage:

Then each man took a bumper, and drank "Success
        to Troy,"
And likewise to the cabin-boy, was neither man
        nor boy.

The sailors drinking Success to Troy, would
be indeed profoundly unintelligible; were not
the hypothesis open to us that the poet
thought reason an unimportant matter,
compared with rhyme.

In "The Lady and the Sailor," occurs one of
the very few bits which can be said to possess,
accidentally or otherwise, any merit in thought
or expression. It is this:

As the lady and [the] sailor was crossing the deep,
Says the lady to the sailor, "You sigh in your sleep."
"I once had a sweetheart," the sailor did say,
"And by her cruel parents I was sent away."

The two following lines of "Erin's Lovely
Home" are better yet; the speaker is a
convict:

There is seven links upon my chain, and every link
        a year
Before I can return again to the arms of my dear.

Some of the comic and satirical pieces are
not without spirit; but, as a general rule, the
style of this class of ballads is even more
wretched than their typography. In one
amorous ditty, the lover says:

        I drew up near this lovely maid,
           All with a complaisanting smile,
        My heart being captivated quite,
           I stood and viewed her for awhile.

In another, he avers:

Her slender waist and carriage has fractured my
       poor brain.

A third song commences in language which
the poet or the printer, or both, have
contrived with great success to invest with the
not uncommon poetical merit of impenetrable
obscurity:

Being in the month of May, when all vesitudes
          was gay,
A young shepperdess came viewing on her flock.

And in a fourth the swain inquires of his
Mary:

        Ah, lovely creature, the pride of Nature!
        Did Cupid send you to the Shannon side?

whereto, properly enough,

        She then made answer, it's all [romance, Sir,]
        For you to flatter a simple dame;
        I'm not so stupid or duped by Cupid,
        So I defy you on me to schame.

On the whole, mythology has gone much
out of esteem. Our present collection
furnishes only one thorough specimen of the
old classical-allusion ballad style; namely,
"The Maid of Slievebawn;" which opens with
Cupid and Morpheus, and prefers its own
heroine to Venus with her peacocks, to the
Nine Muses, and likewise to Juno, "when
drawn in her chariot by swans." The writer,
to get himself into a proper frame of mind
for inspiration, proposes to "range to and
fro,"

Reflecting on Cupid, who on me did promise to
        fawn;

adding—

I'm trepanned in love's chains, and in pain for the
      maid of Slievebawn.

He proceeds as follows, in a state of mind
sublimely distracted:

The grand King of England, this beautiful maid he
        had seen,
He would not let Paris deprive that fair maid of his
        queen;
To Old Ireland he 'd sail to O'Neill at that fair one's
        demand,
His grand Trojan troops he'd encamp at the foot of
        Slievebawn.

Let us now turn to the Party Ballads. Of
these we have fourteen; some poetical, some
on Church polemics.

In Ireland, the mass of the people recognise
but two great parties; the one,
composed of Catholics, patriots, would-be
rebels—these being interchangeable ideas;
the other, of Protestants, Orangemen, wrongful
holders of estates, and oppressors in
general—these also being interchangeable
ideas. It is true, there are Protestants:
who rank on the popular side, and who, on
occasion, receive tumultuous applause from
the common cry. Smith O'Brien and John
Mitchell were of these; and the Young
Irelanders exerted themselves to build an
Irish party, on other than the old ground
of priestly Catholicism; but herein lay one
cause of their failure. THE PEOPLE, in the
confused brains of its many heads, could