Ere that coffin goes down, let it bear on its lid The garland of roses Which the hand of a father, her mourners amid, In silence deposes 'Tis the young maiden's funeral hour! From thy bosom, O earth! sprung that young budding rose Never, never give back the two symbols so pure From the breath of this world and its plague-spot secure, They shall know not its pestilent power! Poor Eliza! for thee life's enjoyments have fled, Then go sleep in the grave! in that cold bridal bed Take this handful of clay for thy dower! Of a texture wert thou far too gentle to last; No. IX. THE SONGS OF FRANCE. ON WINE, WAR, WOMEN, WOODEN SHOES, PHILOSOPHY, FROGS AND FREE TRADE. ' From the Prout Papers. CHAPTER III.-PHILOSOPHY. Quando Gallus cantat, Petrus flet."-Sixtus V. Pont. Max. "Si de nos coqs la voix altière BERANGER. "If old St. Peter on his rock Laid many an egg for his succes- BEFORE we plunge with Prout into the depths of French Philosophy, we must pluck a crow with the "Sun." Not ន often does it occur to us to notice a newspaper criticism; nor, indeed, in this case, should we condescend to wax angry at the discharge of the penny-a-liner's popgun, were it not that an imputation has been cast on the good father's memory, which cannot be overlooked, and must be wiped away. The caitiff who writes in the "Sun" has, at the instigation of Satan, thrown out a hint that these songs, and specifically his brilliant translation of "Malbrouck," were written "under vinous inspiration!" A false and atrocious libel. Great mental powers and superior cleverness are too often supposed to derive assistance from the bottle. Thus the virtue of the elder Cato (prisci Catonis) is most unjustifiably ascribed to potations by unreflecting Horace; and a profane French sophist has attributed Noah's escape from the flood to similar partiality: "Noé le patriarche, De ne point se noyer dans l'eau!" "To have drown'd an old chap, Such a friend to 'the tap,' The flood would have felt compunction: Noah owed his escape To his love for the grape; And his 'ark' was an empty puncheon." The illustrious Queen Anne, who, like our own REGINA, encouraged literature and patronised wit, was thus calum niated after death, when her statue was put up where it now stands, with its back to Paul's church and its face turned towards that celebrated corner of the churchyard which in those days was a brandy-shop. Nay, was not our late dignified Lord Chancellor equally lampooned, without the slightest colour of a pretext, excepting, perhaps, "because his nose is red." Good reason has he to curse his evil genius, and to exclaim with Ovid "Ingenio perii NASO poeta meo!" We were prepared, by our previous knowledge of history, for this outbreak of calumny in Prout's case; we knew, by a reference to the biography of Christopher Columbus, of Galileo, and of Dr. Faustus (the great inventor of the art of printing), that his intellectual superiority would raise up a host of adversaries prepared to malign him, nay, if neces sary, to accuse him of witchcraft. The writer in the "Sun" has not yet gone quite so far, contenting himself for the present with the assertion, that the father penned "these Songs of France" to the sound of a gurgling flagon "Aux doux gloux gloux que fait la bouteille." The idea is not new. When Demosthenes shaved his head, and spent the winter in a cellar transcribing the works of Thucydides, 'twas said of him, on his emerging into the light of the ẞua, that "his speeches smelt of oil." It was stated of that locomotive knight, Sir Richard Blackmore, whose epic poem on King Arthur is now (like Bob Montgomery's" Omnipresence") present nowhere, that he "Wrote to the rumbling of his coach-wheels." uno. In allusion to Byron's lameness, it was hinted by some Zoilus that he penned not a few of his verses stans pede in Even a man's genealogy is not safe from innuendo and inference; for Sam Rogers having discovered, from Béranger's song, "Le Tailleur et la Fée," that his father was a tailor, pronounced his parentage and early impressions to be the cause why he was such a capital hand at a hema-stich. If a similar analogy can hold good in Tom Moore's case (whose juvenile associations were of a grocer sort), it will no doubt become obvious why his compositions are so "highly spiced," his taste so "liquorish," and his muse so prodigal of "sugar-candy." But is it come to this? must we needs, at this time of day, vindicate the holy man's character ? and are we driven to take up the cudgels for his sobriety?-he, whose frugal life was proverbial, and whose zeal, backed by personal example, was all-powerful to win his parishioners from the seduction of barleycorn, and reduce them to a habit of temperance, ad bonam frugem reducere! He, of whom it might be predicated, that while a good conscience was the juge convivium of his mind, his corporeal banquet was a perpetual redherring! Water-cresses, so abundant on that bleak hill, were his only luxury; for he belonged to that class of Pythagorean philosophers of whom Virgil speaks, in his description of the plague: "Non illis epulæ nocuêre repostæ: Frondibus et victu pascuntur simplicis herbæ."- Georg. III. Cicero tells us, in his Tusculan Questions (what he might have read in Xenophon), that water-cresses were a favourite diet in Persia. His words are: "Persæ nihil ad panem adhibebant præter nasturtium.” (Tusc. Quæst. v. 140). I only make this remark, en passant, as, in comparing Ire land with what Tom calls "that delightful province of the sun, The land his orient beam first shines upon,' it would seem that "round towers" and water-cresses are distinctive characteristics of both countries; a matter somewhat singular, since the taste for water-grass is by no means generally diffused among European nations. Pliny, indeed (lib. xix. cap. 8), goes so far as to state, that this herb creates an unpleasant titillation in the nose: "Nasturtium nomen accepit à narium tormento." But Spenser says of the native Irish, that "wherever they found a plot of shamrocks or water-cresses, there they flocked as to a feast."State of Ireland, A.D. 1580. When we assert that Prout was thus a model of abstemiousness, we by no means intend to convey the notion that he was inhospitable. Is not his Carousal on record in the pages of REGINA? and will it not be remembered when the feast of O'Rourke is forgotten? If a friend chanced to drop into his hut on a frosty night, he felt no more scruple in cracking with his guest a few bottles of Medoc, than George Knapp, the redoubtable Mayor of Cork, in demolishing, with his municipal club, a mad-dog's pericranium. Nor were his brother-clergy in that diocese less remarkable for well-ordered conviviality. Horace, in his trip to Brundusium, says, that parish-priests are only bound (on account of their poverty) to supply a stranger with a fire-side of bog-wood, and potatoes and salt "Suppeditant parochi quod debent ligna salemque :” whereas he foolishly imagines that nothing can surpass a bishop's hospitality— "Pontificum potiore cœnis." Were the poet now-a-days (A.D. 1830) to make a trip to Cork, he would find matters managed vice versa. From all we have said on this subject, and still more from what we could add, if inclined to be wrathful, Prout's calumniators may learn a lesson of forbearance and decorum. His paths are the paths of pleasantness and peace. But we are determined to protect him from assault. Far be it from us to throw an apple of discord; but Prout is the apple of our eye. Let the man in "the Sun" read how Daniel O'Rourke fell from "the moon;" let him recollect the Dutch ambassador's remark when the grand monarque shewed him his own royal face painted in the disc of an emblematic "Sol:" "Je ois avec plaisir votre majesté dans le plus grand DES ASTRES." OLIVER YORKE. Dec. 1st, 1834. Watergrasshill, Dec. 1833. THE historian of Charles the Fifth, in that chapter wherein he discourseth of the children of Loyola, takes the opportunity of manifesting his astonishment that so learned a body of men should never have produced, among crowds of poets, critics, divines, metaphysicians, orators, and astronomers, "one single philosopher!" The remark is not original. The ingenious maggot was first generated in the brain of D'Alembert, himself an undeniable "philosopher." Every one, I imagine, knows what guess-sort of wiseacre France_gave birth to in the person of that algebraic personage. I say France in general, a wholesale term, as none ever knew who his parents were in detail, he, like myself, having graduated in a foundling hospital. In the noble seminary des Enfans Trouvés, (that metropolitan magazine for anonymous contributions,) the future geometer was only known by the name of "Jean le Rond," which he exchanged in after-life for the more sonorous title of D'Alembert: not rendering himself thereby a whit more capable of finding the quadrature of the circle. To be sure, in the fancy for a high-sounding name he only imitated his illustrious fellow-labourer in the vineyard, François Arouet, whom mortals have learnt to call "Voltaire" by his own particular desire. Now Robertson, of the Kirk of Scotland, ought to have known, when he adopted, second-hand, this absurdity, that by philosopher the French infidel meant any thing but a well-regulated, |