r" in the poet. That Moore possessed it in probably
the highest degree, will I think, hardly be denied. It never seems to
have mattered to him whether he wrote the words for the air or altered
the air to suit the words. The two fit like a glove, and if, as is
sometimes the case, the same or a similar poetical measure is heard set
to another air than Moore's, this other always seems intrusive and
wrong. He draws attention in one case to the extraordinary irregularity
of his own metre (an irregularity to which the average pindaric is a
mere jog-trot), yet the air fits it exactly. Of course the two feet
which most naturally go to music, the anapaest and the trochee, are
commonest with him; but the point is that he seems to find no more
difficulty, if he does not take so much pleasure, in setting
combinations of a very different kind. Nor is this peculiar gift by any
means unimportant from the purely poetical side, the side on which the
verse is looked at without any regard to air or accompaniment. For the
great drawback to "songs to be sung" in general since Elizabethan days
(when, as Mr. Arber and Mr. Bullen have shown, it was very different)
has been the constant tendency of the verse-writer to sacrifice to his
musical necessities either meaning or poetic sound or both. The climax
of this is of course reached in the ineffable balderdash which usually
does duty for the libretto of an opera, but it is quite as noticeable in
the ordinary songs of the drawing-room. Now Moore is quite free from
this blame. He may not have the highest and rarest strokes of poetic
expression; but at any rate he seldom or never sins against either
reason or poetry for the sake of rhythm and rhyme. He is always the
master not the servant, the artist not the clumsy craftsman. And this I
say not by any means as one likely to pardon poetical shortcomings in
consideration of musical merit, for, shameful as the confession may be,
a little music goes a long way with me; and what music I do like, is
rather of the kind opposite to Moore's facile styles. Yet it is easy,
even from the musical view, to exaggerate his facility. Berlioz is not
generally thought a barrel-organ composer, and he bestowed early and
particular pains on Moore.

To many persons, however, the results are more interesting than the
analysis of their qualities and principles; so let us go to the songs
themselves. To my fancy the three best of Moore's songs, and three of
the finest songs