called by the admiring neighbors 'the
Harp of the Valley.'" Their only child, the father of Lady Morgan, was a
tolerable actor, of loose morals and tight purse, who could sing a good
song or tell a good story, and who was always in debt.

Sydney was a winsome little rogue, quite too much for her precise and
stately mother, who was ever holding up as a model a child, in her grave
fifty years agone, who had read the Bible through twice before she was
five years old, and knitted all the stockings worn by the coachmen! All in
vain: Sydney was not fated to die early or figure as a young saint in a
Sunday-school memoir. She took a deep interest in chimney-sweeps from
observing a den of little imps who swarmed in a cellar near her home, and
on one occasion actually scrambled up a burning chimney, followed by this
sooty troop. Her pets were numerous, the prime favorite being a cat named
Ginger, from her yellow coat. Her mother, who was shocked by Sydney adding
to her nightly petition, "God bless Ginger the cat!" did not share this
partiality, as is seen in the young lady's first attempt at authorship,
which has been preserved:

My dear pussy-cat,
Were I a mouse or a rat,
Sure I never would run off from you,
You're _so_ funny and gay
With your tail when you play,
And no song is so sweet as your mew.
But pray keep in your press,
And don't make a mess,
When you share with your kittens our posset,
For mamma can't abide you,
And I cannot hide you
Unless you keep close in your closet.

Her voice was remarkable, but her father, knowing too well the
temptations that beset a public singer, refused to cultivate her talent
for music, saying, "If I were to do this, it might induce her some day to
go on the stage, and I would prefer to buy her a sieve of black cockles
from Ring's End to cry about the streets of Dublin to seeing her the first
prima donna of Europe." A genuine talent for music will assert itself in
spite of neglect, and one evening at the house of Moore, where with her
sister Olivia she listened in tearful enthusiasm to some of his melodies,
sung as only the poet could sing them, was an important event in her life.
She tells us that after this treat they went home in almost delirious
ecstasy, actually forgetting to undress themselves before going to bed.
This experience developed a longing to know more of the early Irish
ballads, and roused a literary ambition. I