The National Moore. Centenary edition, including the airs of the Irish melodies, national airs, ... and a memoir by J. F. Waller

Front matter

J fay-fasC^-** sh-^lj--cr7S~<-s ■ * ■ ' '-■'■■'■■ ,1 . Lu ■ A LONDON. |The , JiOOHE I f^Z^i _ _ _~ - sTi J -i- INCLUDING THE. NATIONAL AIRS &c J. F. WALLER. LONDON DUBLIN M E M 0 I R OP THOMAS MOORE. HEN the memory of a man is still green in the hearts and affections of his kind after a hundred years have passed since his nativity, it is safe to affirm that he Ls one who has earned a place amongst country," over which so long the cold chain of silence had hung — " And gave all its chords to light, freedom, and song." And now his countrymen are about to celebrate the centenary of his birth. It is very right that they should do so; for they are justly proud of his fame, and his memory is very dear to them. And so it should be. His nature was thoroughly, intensely, in sympathy with that of the children of the land in which he was born.

Gifted Largely with the " perfervidum ingenium Scotorum " — " il fatal dono" — that fatal dowry which brings with it so much of good and of evil, he felt acutely all the wrongs which in his time his country suffered, all the sorrows that afflicted her. In his young college-days he stood forth in manful protest against oppression, and in his poems and songs the hidden fires of passionate love find indignation are perpetually breaking forth, melting and glowing like lava. He is in accord with all the hilarious delight, the rich humour, the tender love in which the Irish people forget themselves in the midst of their grief and trials, "laKpoon/ -/sXauara," smiling through their tears, and he interprets this varying sentiment with incomparable fidelity in his songs that find their echo in every Irish heart.

And he loved his country with a true love. We assert this fearlessly, despite of the old hackneyed slander because he was forced by circumstances to cast his lot out of it. The honour we pay to poets is as old as civilization. And of all poets, the lyric poet received especial honour ; for in old times he made and sang his verses, combining the gifts of two of the Muses. Homer gives expression to this sentiment, when he addresses Demodocus after he had sung his own strains to his lyre — the Immortals in the Valhalla of his country. So it is with many who, within our own day, have completed their centenary of probation, have lived down the petty criti cisms and calumnies, the envies and jealousies that trooped about them, like clouds, through their career, hovering over them as they set like suns below the horizon, only to reflect the glory of their brightness when they htid passed away — " Urit enim fulgore suo qui prægravat artes Infra sc positas — extinctus amabitur idem.'' Such were Gœthe and Schiller, the Schlegels and the Humboldts, Berenger, Goldsmith, Burns, Scott, Campbell, Wordsworth, Southey, and many others whose names are enshrined in Westminster and St. Paul's, and in the cathedrals and churches of our own islands.