Though Scotch philosophers and Jews The Church and each thing That our loyal fathers honour'd most; A WISH. SAMUEL ROGERS, born 1762, died 1855. Set as a glee by HORSLEY. MINE be a cot beside the hill; A bee-hive's hum shall soothe my ear; The swallow oft, beneath my thatch, And share my meal, a welcome guest. Around my ivied porch shall spring Each fragrant flower that drinks the dew; The village church among the trees, Where first our marriage-vows were given, THE PLOUGHSHARE OF OLD ENGLAND. ELIZA COOK. THE sailor boasts his stately ship, the bulwark of the isle; We'll pluck the brilliant poppies and the far-famed barley-corn, To wreathe with bursting wheat-ears that outshine the saffron morn; We'll crown it with a glowing heart, and pledge our fertile land, The ploughshare of Old England and the sturdy peasant band! The work it does is good and blest, and may be proudly told; The bark may rest upon the wave, HE Bacchanalian and Convivial Songs of the English people are not of a high order of merit. The most elegant of them are translations, or paraphrases, of the Odes of Anacreon-the only author who has eminently succeeded in wreathing the flowers of fancy around the drinking-cup, or in rendering even tolerable, to the taste of a refined and civilised people, the praises of intoxication. But 66 in borrowing from Anacreon, the English song-writers, with the exception of Thomas Moore, who added new graces even to Anacreon, too often forgot, or were unable to borrow his elegance and wit. The result is, that the greater portion of English drinking-songs would be more appropriate to the worship of Silenus than of Bacchus. Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne," as depicted by Shakspeare, has been the divinity of song-writers, not one of whom seems to have had any idea of the intellectual Dionysius of the Greeks. Bacchus has been degraded by the moderns into a kind of superhuman Falstaff—a sensual monster -abusing the gifts of Heaven instead of using them. Some of the early drinking-songs are valuable for preserving traits of national manners, which might otherwise have been lost. Bishop Still's song of "Good Ale" is one of this class; and a few others are entitled to the same praise. But in the age succeeding that of Elizabeth-when the simple and the natural in poetry of all kinds began to decay-the convivial songs, like those in celebration of the passion of love, partook largely of the mythological character; and, for more than two centuries, the vulgarised Bacchus, who sits astride upon a barrel on public-house signs, was the deity of topers, and presided over their feasts. The 66 Muses" and the "Graces" were appealed to, to lend their aid; and "Care," an impersonation unknown to the ancients, was evermore called upon to let himself be drowned in the bowl. It was not till near the end of the eighteenth century that the song-worship of Bacchus began to decline; and when mythology went out of fashion in love songs, it was to a great extent driven from the drinking-songs also. Baron Dawson, the author of a lyric entitled "Squire Jones," published in the seventeenth century, though among the first to ridicule the constant mythological allusions of the versifiers, fell into the same fault himself when he spoke of drinking : Learn Bacchus to follow, Forsake all the Muses-those senseless old crones; Our jingling of glasses Your rhyming surpasses, When crown'd with good claret and bumpers, Squire Jones!" But the complaint which we feel bound to reiterate against the vulgarity of tone, and the unworthiness of the sentiments in our convivial songs, is not a new one. "There is nothing," says Hugh Kelly, in the "Babbler" (No 30), quoted in the introduction to the Rev. H. Plumptre's Collection of Songs (1805), "at which I am more offended than the unpardonable vein of ignorance and brutality so generally introduced in our drinking songs; nor anything, in my opinion, which throws a greater reflection upon the understanding of a sensible society. If we examine the principal number of these pretty compositions, we shall find that absolute intoxication is recommended as the highest felicity in the world, and that we receive the most positive assurances of being upon an equality with angels the very moment we sink ourselves into a situation considerably lower than men. 66 It has been justly observed, that every nation, in proportion as it is civilised, has abolished intemperance in wine; and consequently must be barbarous in proportion as it is addicted to excess. The remark, I am rather apprehensive, will be found no very great compliment to the people of this kingdom. We are apt to place good-fellowship in riot, and have but too natural a promptitude in imagining that the happiness of an evening is promoted by an extravagant circulation of the glass; hence are our songs of festivity (as I have already taken notice) fraught with continual encomiums on the pleasures of intoxication, and the whole tribe of bacchanalian lyrics perpetually telling us how wonderfully sensible it is to destroy our senses, and how nothing can be more rational in a human creature than to drink till he has not left himself a single glimmer of reason at all. "But if, abstracted from the brutal intention of our drinking-songs in general, we should come to consider their merit as literary performances, how very few of them should we find |