a tooth, exactly corresponding in position
with one lost by Heasman.  The coroner
could not discern that any of the witnesses
would benefit by the death of the deceased;
he gave them all credit for being sincere,
however certain it was that some of them
must have been mistaken.  The jury, after
a patient investigation, agreed with the
coroner, that the deceased was the lunatic
Heasman; but they could not find how he
had come by his death, although they
believed he had poisoned himself.

IRISH STREET SONGS.

IT has long been known by all persons
acquainted with Ireland and the Irish, that
Tom Moore's songs, charming and musical
as they are, never acquired any real
popularity with the large mass of the people,
especially that large section who still speak
the Celtic language, and for the most part
the Celtic language only.  The men in
frieze very soon discovered that there was
something wanting in the lyrist of Holland
House.  Irish poets, too, complained that
the fine old melodies of Erin were
corrupted, tinkered, and often spoiled by the
bard of Paternoster-row. They found, they
said, a want of earnestness and patriotism,
worst of all, a deficiency of Irish feeling,
character, and local colour.

Severer and less impulsive critics laid
the lyrist on their quiet respective
dissecting-tables.  The most honest of these
gentlemen (we need hardly say we allude to
the Whig critics) confessed the delightful
harmony of such songs as She is Far from
the Land where her Young Hero Sleeps
(an elegy on poor misguided young
Emmet), There's not in the Wide World a
Valley so Sweet, and Love's Young
Dream.  But, indeed, they said, considering
that Moore stole the music, they could
hardly bestow much praise on him for
making his English drawing-room songs
harmonious.  The music of the old Irish
melodies was an exhalation, they cried,
drawn by God's blessed sunshine (here
they grew almost poetical), from the green
fields, bold capes, and wild mountains of
Erin; but they went on, look how Tom
lisps and minces to please the London
season, and the Saxon drones and
butterflies.  Deficient, said they, in vehemence,
power, and moral strength, he cloys you,
he overloads a narrow hem of thought with
pretty metaphors and millinery. Nevertheless
he is immeasurably our greatest poet,
went on the Aristarchuses of Cork and
Dublin; he is even, they went so far as to
say, the greatest lyrist that ever lived,
except Burns and Béranger; and even Burns
he rivalled in his gay measures.  But he is
an alien from Erin.  Long after, but still in
the poet's lifetime, Mr. Crofton Croker, in
his book on The Popular Songs of Ireland,
published in 1839, revived these accusations
with good-natured satire.  "Mr. Thomas
Moore's songs," says that pleasant writer,
quoting somebody (we shrewdly believe
himself), "in general, have as much to do
with Ireland as with Nova Scotia.  Go
where Glory waits Thee, might just as
well have been sung by a cheesemonger's
daughter in High Holborn, when her
father's gallant apprentice was going, in a
fit of irrepressible valour and drink, to
enlist himself in the Third Buffs."  And
then again, says Mr. Croker, "Tom
Moore's allusions to Irish localities, are
scattered thinly about his songs, like the
plums in the pudding of a Yorkshire
school, only just to save appearances,
and to stand godfather to the hypocritical
dish."

The Irish class themselves, in songs, as
equal to the Germans, inferior only to the
Scotch, and superior to the Italians, the
Spaniards, and the English. It might, perhaps,
lessen the value of this assertion to
remark that Mr. Thomas Davis, of the Nation
(who made it), did not know much of either
German, Italian, or Spanish; but still the
assertion remains as a standard for future
Irish writers equally qualified to pronounce
a judgment.  While the Irish allow Burns
to be a poet of a higher class than Moore,
they envy France Béranger.  But the
Englishman, the poor, absurd, wrong-headed
Saxon, they say, is nowhere among the
lyrical poets.  The Jacobite risings moved
the heart and brain of Scotland, as
profoundly as if the return of the scurvy
Stuarts would have secured a pot of money
to every Scotchman; but even the civil
wars did not inspire England with a single
ballad that has lived.  Even the powerful
deities, Mars, Bacchus, and Venus, says
Mr. Thomas Davis, have not inspired half
a dozen good English songs.  There's Rule
Britannia; but then that pompous lyric
was written by Thomson, a Scotchman.
There's the British Grenadiers; but that
was penned by an Irish regimental chaplain.
There's God save the King; but that's "a
parody on a Scotch song." (?) There is,
also, merry Bishop Still's somewhat
unorthodox Jolly Good Ale and Old, which is