THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY'S SONGS AND BALLADS.

IT is said that during the rehearsal of The Duenna, the author was hard to please as to the air of a particular song. The composer made several efforts in vain ; but on the last production the drama- tist exclaimed, "That will do, Sir : it will grind,"—meaning that it would be played about the streets on barrel-organs. SHERIDAN'S test of excellence in music was fulfilled in poetry by Thomas HAYNES BALMY. As popular as Mooaz in the boudoir, the salon, the drawing-room, the " parlour, kitchen, and all," the Songs and Ballads of HAystEs BAYLY attained the greater honours of being vended by the yard, or of standing the facile erinceps of "one hundred new and fashionable songs for a penny. The attraction of "Oh no, we never mention her," "She wore a wreath of roses," "The mistletoe bough," "I'd be a butterfly," and many others, has been vouched for by voices bawling in every variety of in- tonation, and by " humans " who had not even advanced to the chrysalis state in their approach to the butterfly transformation.

Some of this popularity in "all circles," and among that large class of persons who are not considered to form a circle, may un- doubtedly be ascribed to the merit of the music. Himself a melo- dist, though not a scientific musician, HAYNES BAYLY took care that his airs, whether original or selected, should "grind." The great secret of his success, however, lies in his power of reflecting the popular sentiment in a popular form. Upon the given theme, this writer thinks as everybody thinks, that thinks about it ; or he echoes the general sentiment, and more clearly, more simply, and more elegantly, than the generality could conceive it for them. selves. Hence HAYNES BAYLY was eminently the poet of existing society. In a more coarse and jovial age, his success would have been less ; for though he had much geniality, it was geniality drawn mild. He dealt rather with sentiment than with feeling—still less with passion; and though some of his subjects were so far tragic that they terminate in blood and murder, still the "poor thing" of good society is the highest exclamation the denouement excites. This reflex of the feeling of the amiably genteel is visible through every part of his composition. Except in sportive effusions upon incon- stancy, the morals he points are unexceptionable ; but they are those of society at large—nothing above its opinion, nothing lower than what the mass would avow. His subjects are drawn from the common incidents of society, (very often, it would seem from Mrs. BAYLY'S Memoir, suggested by them,) or from the social stock of classicality and romance. His thoughts and views are not merely those of the mass, but such as philosophy might hold upon the matter, limited as the writer limits it ; and his style, simple and pellucid to a degree, often drops into conventionalisms, though it never approaches vulgarity. After this, it would seem superfluous to say that HAYNES BAYLY is clear ; but his clearness is not the mere faculty of making his meaning easily understood—his ideas are level to the apprehension of all his readers : the intellect is never tasked to understand him; the mind need not be raised to follow him, or at least not raised above the thickness of a carpet. In longer and larger themes, and even in some of the less attractive songs, a slight weariness may be felt; but it arises from the absence of interest, not from the presence of those positive faults that lessen effect.

Besides the tender and sentimental, HAYNES BAYLY attempted the satirical, and in a few instances the comical. In these styles the same kind of qualities are present. His comic songs, though humorous, have nothing ludicrous ; still less any thing of coarseness to shock the most fastidious. In his satire there is nothing of bitterness, and it may be added nothing of strength : he rather tickles than stings. His subjects, however, are follies, and, seen from his point of view, follies of a silly rather than a mischievous character ; so that the style is proportioned to the subjects,—a praise to which he is ever entitled, save when the music interferes with the measure of the words, or the writer wanders into remoter ages and loses his way. From what we have said of the satirical poetry, the third of the Fashionable Eclogues must be excepted. Such a jeu d'esprit should never have been published, or if pub- lished should have been suppressed if practicable. It could only have been conceived by an habitue of "good society." The circumstances we have mentioned were, no doubt, the causes of HAYNES BAYLY'S popularity ; but in many of his best works he attains a literary excellence which rivals and in some things surpasses MoortE. With the animation and vivacity of the Irish lyrist, he has more nature and more ease—probably more fancy. Without any appearance of elaboration or careful polish, he sometimes attains a degree of curious felicity and graceful negligence, together with an airiness of manner, of which we remember no example in MOORE. Take, for instance, the closing stanza of " rd be a butterfly "; where he inculcates the maxim of a" short life and a merry one," with a play of fancy and an artless felicity of diction, which we think cannot be equalled unless by HEstateK, and perhaps not by him.

"What though you tell me each gay little rover Shrinks from the breath of the first Autumn-day Surely 'tie better, when Summer is over, To die when all fair things are fading away. Some in life's Winter may toil to discover Means of procuring a weary delay— I'd be a Butterfly, living a rover, Dying when fair things are fading away!

The The next is not so airy, nor the moral it contains so popular— even if the true moral is developed ; but a touching tenderness pervades the whole ; and, confining poetry, as some do, to graces of diction and brilliancy of imagery, surpasses the former.

"Oh! Folly caught me, as I slept, Upon a lilac spray;

And spurned me, when his hand had swept My golden down away. Look at my bruised and broken wing, 'Twill bear me hence no more : The flowers will bloom, the birds will sing, But my summer-flight is o'er. Alas, alas! bow very brief Is Pleasure's brightest ray ! The sun that warms the summer-leaf Will hasten its decay.

"I was the Insect-Queen, and oft On me admirers gazed ; And, as in sport I soar'd aloft, My beauty has been praised. But other triflers will be found To grace the garden now ; And other wings will hover round My own sweet lilac-bough.

Alas, alas! how very brief

IS Pleasure's brightest ray !

The sun that warms the summer-leaf Will hasten its decay."

"Carpe diem" is a maxim as old as Hottacn, and probably as old as man ; though more agreeable to his reasoning than con- sistent with his constitution. This old maxim is, it appears to us, enforced with the effect of freshness in the following stanzas, from the dialogue character imparted by means of a listener as well as an adviser. The song also exhibits more strength and more of worldly reality than are often met with in HAYNES BAYLY. The peculiarity of the rhythm arises from the character of the Welsh air to which it was adapted.

"Think not of the future, the prospect is uncertain ; Laugh away the present, while laughing hours remain : Those who gaze too boldly through Time's mystic curtain, Soon will wish to close it, and dream of joy again.

I, like thee, was happy, and, on hope relying, Thought the present pleasure might revive again : But, receive my counsel—Time is always flying ; Then laugh away the present, while laughing hours remain.

"I have felt unkindness, keen as that which hurts thee ; I have met with friendship, fickle as the wind ; Take what friendship offers, ere its warmth deserts thee ; Well I know the kindest may not long be kind. Would you waste the pleasure of the summer-season, Thinking that the winter must return again ?

If our summer's fleeting, surely that's a reason For laughing off the present, while laughing boars remain."

In a literary point of view, the Ballads are not equal to the Songs; but probably they are more popular, embracing story as well as sentiment. And in the management of the story HAYNES BAYLY sometimes exhibits an unrivalled skill. It is not only that he tells the tale well and clearly, selecting those circumstances which produce the deepest impression on the mind ; but, by uniting the dramatic with the narrative form, he compresses time and space. Each stanza often forms a species of act, the intermediate circumstances being passed over as in a drama. Besides two or three novels, HAYNES BAYLY wrote several dra- matic "entertainments," distinguished for lightness and vivacity, as well as for a more elegant literature than generally belongs to the modern stage. These are not included in this collection : the longer poems, which are included, require little remark. They have happy passages; but as wholes they are deficient in point, spirit, and power, though easy and fluent enough. HAYNES BAYLY was not de- signed by nature for long flights, and he seems to have borrowed no assistance from art. His faculty of song-writing was a gifl ; improv- ing, no doubt, with the justness of perception, the accumulation of imagery, and the wider range of thought that experience gives, but depending for its exercise upon the subjects that excited him, and the spontaneous flow of his ideas. He delighted not in the labor limte ; his habits and his mind were unfitted to its exercise. What was written was written ; and there he left it, without any effort to accumulate images, impart strength, or even remove weakness, much less to work up every thing to some standard of excellence and suppress the poem if that excellence were not reached. Hence it arises, that many of his songs, though pretty, are only pretty com- monplace; and a tiny volume of HAYNES BAYLY, as of Ilsaatcx and MOORE, will satisfy after generations. Mrs. HAYNES BAYLY has prefixed a slight and unpretending notice of her husband's life ; from which we glean a few traits. Tracing upwards to his " paternal great-grandmother," and then down again by another channel, he called the present Earl of STAMFORD and WARRINGTON " cousin"; and submitting the "maternal great- grandfather" to a similar process, he became a relation of the "Baroness LE DESPENCER, of Mereworth Castle, near Maidstone." His father was an eminent and wealthy lawyer, near Bath. Little HAYNES BAYLY, like POPE, " lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came ": at the age of seven, he dramatized a tale out of one of his story-books, and wrote verses in round-hand, before he had mastered small. After passing through Winchester school, his father wished him to follow his own profession of the law : but "he penti'd a stanza when he should engross." The poet himself thought of the church : he was sent to Oxford to study theology, and passed the vacations at the Isle of Wight with a private tutor' but he went out yachting at the Garden of England, and wrote poetry when at Alma Mater. The last year of his residence at Oxford was marked by a love-affair, which coloured his career. One morning he received a letter from a fair unknown, who turned out to be the sister of a college companion, solicitous for her brother's health. This led to an epistolary correspondence : as the brother's illness advanced, HAYNES B4 SLY watched over him with his wonted kindness, and closed his eyes when he died. On a subsequent visit to the family at Bath, an attachment sprung up between the poet and the young lady : but old Mr. BAYLY refused to advance the needful ; the father of the lady, a Colonel, was equally inexorable ; and the lovers parted, to meet no more. The melancholy induced by this disappointment gave rise to a

journey to Scotland and Ireland, as well as to the production of several poems, and among them, " Oh no, we never mention her,"—a song which has been translated into five other languages, and which first established the author's popularity. As the lady married somebody else soon after, there seems to have been more

truth in the "reports of friends " than in the poet's conjecture— "They tell me she is happy now,

The gayest of the gay ; They hint that she forgets me !— But heed not what they say : Like me, perhaps she struggles with

Each feeling of regret."

On his return from Dublin, his introduction to the present Mrs. HAYNES BAYLY, then Miss HATES, took place. Miss HATES having "heard with delight the ballad of Isabel,' expressed the greatest anxiety to see its author." One of her suitors, who knew Toomas HAYNES BAYLY, exultingly undertook, like a simpleton, to bring his lion friend to a party ; and brought his own bane. The poet came, and saw, but did not "conquer" till after two years' courtship ; the lady even persuading her mother to take a trip to Paris to avoid him : but she so missed his wit and pleasantry, that absence, by contrast, served him better than his presence. After the marriage, the young couple made a tour of visits, and spent some time at Lord ASIITOWN S ; where "I'd be a butterfly" was composed. As the story is pleasant in itself', and illustrates the author's mode of composition, we will quote it— "A large party was staying at LordAshtown's ; and the day before it broke up, the ladies, on leaving the dining-table, mentioned their intention of taking a stroll through his beautiful grounds; and the gentlemen promised to follow them in ten minutes. Lured by Bacchus, they forgot their promise to the Graces ; and Mr. Haynes Bayly was the only one who thought fit to move; and he in about half an hour wandered forth in search of the ladies. They beheld him at a distance ; but, pretending annoyance at his not joining them sooner, they fled away in an opposite direction. The poet wishing to carry on the joke, did not seek to overtake them : they observed this, and lingered, hoping to attract his attention. He saw this manceuvre, and determined to turn the tables upon them. He waved his hand carelessly, and pursued his ramble alone : then falling into a reverie, he entered a beautiful summer-house, known now by the name of Butterfly Bower, overlooking the water, and there seated himself. Here, inspired by a butterfly which had just flitted before him, he wrote the well-known ballad now alluded to. He then returned to the house, and found the ladies assembled round the tea-table; when they smilingly told him they bad enjoyed their walk in the shrubberies excessively, and that they needed no escort. He was now determined to go beyond them in praise of Ids solitary evening walk, and said that he had never enjoyed himself so much in his life ; that he bad met a butterfly, with whom he had wandered in the regions of fancy, which had afforded him much more pleasure than he would have found in chasing them ; and that he had put his thoughts in verse. The ladies immediately gave up all further contention with the wit, upon his pro- mising to show them the lines he had just written. He then produced his tablets, and read the well-known ballad,

• I'd be a butterfly, born in a bower,' to the great delight of his fair auditors. "It should perhaps be here remarked, that the poet foretold his own doom in

this ballad ; for it will be seen, by his early death, that his nerves were too finely strung to bear the unforeseen storms of severe disappointment which gathered round him in after years. On the same evening, he composed the air, to which Mrs. Haynes Bay ly put the accompaniments and symphonies; and it was sung the following evening to a very large party assembled at Lord Ash- town's, who encored it again and again."

The pecuniary misfortunes Mrs. BA FLY alludes to occurred in 1831, and were unexpected and severe. There was "money on both sides" ; but the father of the poet had been tempted to invest large sums, including his son's marriage-portion, in iron-mines, which suddenly became unproductive. The fortune of Mrs. HAYNES BAYLY was an Irish property, which the agent had not duly attended to, and which might have suffered from some agri- cultural depression. The result was, reduced and uncertain remit- tances. These difficulties drove the poet abroad, and harassed his mind; whilst, compelled in a measure to depend upon his pen, his former facility for some time deserted him. He eventually rallied, and recovered some portion of his powers ; but his next eight years were a struggle with adverse fortune, and latterly with failing health. Ile died of a deranged liver, at Cheltenham, in April 1839, in the forty-second year of his age, having been born in October 1797.