this vein, for his wife's
Irish property got into an Irish bog of dishonesty and difficulty. Thirty-
five pieces were contributed by him to the British stage. After a long
illness, he died on April 22nd, 1829. He did not live, this butterfly
minstrel, into the winter of human age.

Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom Moore of
much lower accomplishments. His business was to carol of the most vapid
and obvious sentiment, and to string flowers, fruits, trees, breeze,
sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds, regret, deception, and so
forth, into fervid anapaestics. Perhaps his success lay in knowing
exactly how little sense in poetry composers will endure and singers will
accept. Why, "words for music" are almost invariably trash now, though
the words of Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and
difficult question. Like most poets, I myself detest the sister art, and
don't know anything about it. But any one can see that words like
Bayly's are and have long been much more popular with musical people than
words like Shelley's, Keats's, Shakespeare's, Fletcher's, Lovelace's, or
Carew's. The natural explanation is not flattering to musical people: at
all events, the singing world doted on Bayly.

"She never blamed him--never,
But received him when he came
With a welcome sort of shiver,
And she tried to look the same.

"But vainly she dissembled,
For whene'er she tried to smile,
A tear unbidden trembled
In her blue eye all the while."

This was pleasant for "him"; but the point is that these are lines to an
Indian air. Shelley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines to an Indian
air; but we may "swear, and save our oath," that the singers preferred
Bayly's. Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal the popularity of what
follows. I shall ask the persevering reader to tell me where Bayly ends,
and where parody begins:

"When the eye of beauty closes,
When the weary are at rest,
When the shade the sunset throws is
But a vapour in the west;
When the moonlight tips the billow
With a wreath of silver foam,
And the whisper of the willow
Breaks the slumber of the gnome,--
Night may come, but sleep will linger,
When the spirit, all forlorn,
Shuts its ear against the singer,
And the rustle of the corn
Round the sad old mansion sobbing
Bids the wakeful maid recal