mething, and hoping on,--full of the brine, the salt foam,
the sad story of the sea. Nothing would give you a more vivid sense of
the Manx people than some of our old airs. They would seem to take you
into a little whitewashed cottage with sooty rafters and earthen floor,
where an old man who looks half like a sailor and half like a landsman
is dozing before a peat fire that is slumbering out. Have I in my
musical benightedness conveyed an idea of anything musical? If not, let
me, by the only vehicle natural to me, give you the rough-shod words of
one or two of our old ballads. There is a ballad, much in favour, called
_Ny kirree fo niaghey_, the Sheep under the Snow. Another, yet better
known, is called _Myle Charaine_. This has sometimes been called the
Manx National Air, but that is a fiction. The song has nothing to do
with the Manx as a nation. Perhaps it is merely a story of a miser
and his daughter's dowry. Or perhaps it tells of pillage, probably of
wrecking, basely done, and of how the people cut the guilty one off from
all intercourse with them.

O, Myle Charaine, where got you your gold?
Lone, lone, you have left me here,
O, not in the curragh, deep under the mould,
Lone, lone, and void of cheer.

This sounds poor enough, but it would be hard to say how deeply this
ballad, wedded to its wailing music, touches and moves a Manxman. Even
to my ear as I have heard it in Manx, it has seemed to be one of the
weirdest things in old ballad literature, only to be matched by some of
the old Irish songs, and by the gruesome ditty which tells how "the sun
shines fair on Carlisle wa'."

MANX CAROLS

The paraphrase I have given you was done by George Borrow, who once
visited the island. My friend the Rev. T. E. Brown met him and showed
him several collections of Manx carols, and he pronounced them all
translations from the English, not excepting our famous _Drogh Vraane_,
or carol of every bad woman whose story is told in the Bible, beginning
with the story of mother Eve herself. And, indeed, you will not be
surprised that to the shores of our little island have drifted all
kinds of miscellaneous rubbish, and that the Manxmen, from their very
simplicity and ignorance of other literatures, have had no means of
sifting the flotsam and assigning value to the constituents. Besides
this, they are so irresponsible, have no literary conscience, and
accordingly have appropriated anything and everythi