| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
STORIES OF
lous songs that were once so prevalent in every Irish village, when every stripling would be a bardeen, and sing his foolish rhymes to a foolish audience. Rhyme in Ireland has too often been more effective than reason, and this weakness of the peasantry, of composing verses of an extravagant and comically high faluting order, engaged the pens of the satirists for hundreds of years. Stanihurst, in 1583, published an imitation of the Anglo-Irish style attached to his translation of " The First Four Books of Virgil's JEneis," which he called " An Epitaph, entitled Commune Defunctorum, such as our unlearned Rithmours accustomably make upon the death of every Tom Tyler, as if it were a last for eveiy one his foote, in which the quan-tities of sillables are not to be heeded." The burlesque is full of points. Milliken never dreamed that his chaffing ballad would attain such distinction and celebrity, and though it went out anonymously to the rest of the world, in Co. Cork its origin and authorship were well known. It reached London in due course, and was called in one of the weekly prints, " The National Irish Poem." Lockhart, in his " Life of Sir Walter Scott," attributed it to "the poetical Dean of Cork." It was so famous in London that everybody was singing and quoting
178 |
||