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the first thought of Anster Fair occurred to him, and his diction shows that he was a delighted student of Spenser and Shakespeare. It was probably from these native sources and not from the Italian masters that he drew his in piration. His discipleship to Spenser is proclaimed in the Alexandrine with which he closes his eightrhyme stanza. But he was no mere imitator and copyist; home. grown popular legends and popular sports supplied him with his materials, and he handled them boldly in his own fashion, transporting them into a many-coloured atmosphere of humorous imagination. The specimen here quoted will give some idea of his powers of imaginative description.

W. MINTO

RAB THE RANTER'S BAG-PIPE PLAYING.

[From Anster Fair.]

Nodded his liege assent, and straightway bade
Him stand a-top o' th' hillock at his side;
A-top he stood; and first a bow he made

To all the crowd that shouted far and wide;
Then like a piper dexterous at his trade,

His pipes to play adjusted and applied;

Each finger rested on its proper bore,

His arm appeared half-raised to wake the bag's uproar.

A space he silent stood, and cast his eye
In meditation upwards to the pole,

As if he prayed some fairy power in sky

To guide his fingers right o'er bore and hole; Then pressing down his arm, he gracefully

Awaked the merry bag-pipes' slumbering soul, And piped and blew, and played so sweet a tune As well might have unsphered the reeling midnight noon.

His every finger, to its place assigned,

Moved quivering like the leaf of aspen tree,
Now shutting up the skittish squeaking wind,
Now opening to the music passage free;
His cheeks, with windy puffs therein confined,
Were swol'n into a red rotundity

As from his lungs into the bag was blown
Supply of needful air to feed the growling drone.

And such a potent tune did never greet

The drum of human ear with lively strain,

So merry, that from dancing on his feet
No man, undeaf, could stockishly refrain;

So loud, 'twas heard a dozen miles complete,

Making old Echo pipe and hum again; So sweet, that all the birds in air that fly

Charmed into new delight came sailing through the sky.

*

Nor was its influence less on human ear:

First from their gilded chairs upstart at once, The royal James and Maggie, seated near,

Enthusiastic both and mad to dance:

Her hand he snatched and looked a merry leer,
Then capered high in wild extravagance,
And on the grassy summit of the knoll,

Wagged each monarchial leg in galliard strange and droll

As when a sunbeam from the waving face
Of well-filled water-pail reflected bright
Varies upon the chamber walls its place,

And quivering tries to cheat and foil the sight;
So quick did Maggie with a nimble grace,
Skip pattering to and fro, alert and light,

And with her nobe colleague in the reel

Haughtily tossed her arms, and shook her glancing heel.

The Lords and Ladies next, who sat or stood
Near to the Piper and the King around,
Smitten with that contagious dancing mood
'Gan hand in hand in high lavolt to bound,
And jigged it on as featly as they could,

Circling in sheeny rows the rising ground,
Each sworded Lord a Lady's soft palm griping,
And to his mettle roused at such unwonted piping.

Then did the infectious hopping mania seize

The circles of the crowd that stood more near,
Till round and round, far spreading by degrees,
It maddened all the Loan to kick and rear:
Men, women, children, lilt and ramp and squeeze,
Such fascination takes the general ear,

Even babes that at their mothers' bosoms hung
Their little willing limbs fantastically flung.

And hoar haired men and wives, whose marrow age Hath from their hollow bones sucked out and drunk, Canary in unconscionable rage,

Nor feel their sinews withered now and shrunk, Pell-mell, in random couples they engage,

And boisterously wag feet, arms, and trunk, As if they strove, in capering so brisk,

To heave their aged knees up to the solar disk.

And cripples from beneath their shoulders fling
Their despicable crutches far away,

Then, yoked with those of stouter limbs, upspring
In hobbling merriment, uncouthly gay;

And some on one leg stand y-gambolling ;

For why? the other short and frail had they; Some, both whose legs distorted were and weak, Dance on their poor knee-pans in mad preposterous freak

So on they trip, King, Maggie, Knight and Earl,
Green-coated courtier, satin-snooded dame,
Old men and maidens, man, wife, boy, and girl,
The stiff, the supple, bandy-legged, and lame,—
All suckt and wrapt into the dance's whirl,

Inevitably witched within the same;

Whilst Rab far-seen, o'erlooks the huddling Loan,
Rejoices in his pipes and squeals serenely on.

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[THOMAS MOORE was born at No. 12, Aungier Street, Dublin, on May 28, 1779. He began to print verses at the age of thirteen, and became popular in early youth as a precocious genius. He came to London in 1799, and was received into fashionable society. In 1803 he was made Admiralty Registrar at Bermuda, a post he soon resigned to a deputy and returned to England after travelling in Canada and the United States. In 1819 he was involved in financial ruin by the embezzlements of his Bermuda agent, and left England in company with Lord John Russell. He came back to England in 1822. After a very quiet life, the end of which was saddened by the deaths of his five children, he died at Sloperton on Feb. 25, 1852. His chief poetical works are-Odes of Anacreon. 1800; Little's Poems, 1801; Odes and Epistles, 180); Irish Melodies, 1807 to 1834; Lalla Rookh, 1817; The Fudge Family in Paris, 1818; Rhymes on the Read, 1819; The Loves of the Angels, 1823.]

When Moore wrote his Life of Byron in 1830 and casually spoke of Mr. Shelley as a finer poet than himself, the world admired his generous modesty, but smiled at the exaggerated instance of it. Yet, even then, close observers like Leigh Hunt noticed that the dazzling reputation of the Irish lyrist was on the wane, and that his supremacy as a singer was by no means likely to remain long unchallenged. A few years earlier Christopher North had said, in his autocratical manner, of all the song-writers that ever warbled, the best is Thomas Moore.' A few years later, as Keats and Tennyson came before the world with a richer and more artistic growth of verse, the author of The Loves of the Angels passed more and more into the background, until at last in our own day critics have dared to deny him all merit, and even to treat him as a kind of lyrical Pariah, an outcast at whom every one is welcome to cast a stone.

As usual in the case of such vicissitudes of taste, the truth seems to lie inidway between the extremes, and as in 1830 it would have

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