The National Music Of The World

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	208 'National Music of the World.



	I cannot fancy a more efficient engine of torment to one's foes than this tune.

	But besides these incoherent and ranting measures, ascribable to a strange harp and to vulgar pipers, Irish music contains many delicious tunes, attractive because of their regularity, delicately tender, and rarely sweet: many of these are in old rhythms. There is the melody, ' At the mid-hour of night'—to recall Moore's words—which consists of five lines of five-bar phrases, the same containing one five-bar phrase three times repeated, another twice repeated. There is a tune called 'John, heir of the glen;' there