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FAMOUS SONGS
of too many of the editors of these Collections and Anthologies, and consequently much rub-bish has been included that might well have been allowed to seek the shade in the sheltering protection of the literary dust-bin.
In Irish folk and country songs is seen the terrible havoc that a devastating history has played on a sorrow-brooding, sensitive nation whose chief characteristics have ever been fantas-tic light-heartedness and humorous indifference to the inevitable with the antithesis of sadness and despair to its lowest depths. These curious traits which have been fostering for lengthy generations—say from the time of Henry II.— have had such an effect upon the poets and poetry of Ireland, that one string at least of the harp seems to have been snapped in twain and a foreign minor has usurped its place. And thus too it has occurred that the best work of Irish writers has been done on alien soil—in lands free from the tearless gloom and pathos that has bowed them down in their own home. There-fore the most brilliant achievements in the artistic world that has marked that marvellous intellectuality of the Irish giants have reached fruition in a country other than their own.
It is but to repeat an accepted fact that Ire-land, in her earliest ages, when the inhabitants
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