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SONGS,

SACRED SONGS,

AND

National Airs.

BY THOMAS MOORE, Esq.

BRIDGEPORT.

PUBLISHED BY M. SHERMAN,

(RECAR

4-4

PREFACE.

AT the request of the Proprietors of my musical compositions, I have revised them for publication in this collective form, and shall be happy to find that those who like my songs are numerous enough to justify the Publishers in such an expensive experiment. A few of my earlier ballads have been omitted; one or two, that required but little alteration to make them unexceptionable, have been corrected; and, altogether, though but ill qualified to act the part of a Brutus to my own progeny, I should hope that nothing has been allowed to live in this collection, by which the common-weal of morals can suffer the slightest detriment. I had some momentary scruples indeed, about one song; but recol lecting, in addition to its being particularly popular, that it had had the honor of being translated into French by a very learned English divine, I thought the sacrifice might appear over righteous, and have accordingly, for the present, indulged it with a reprieve. It has always been a subject of some mortification to me, that my songs, as they are set, give such a very imperfect notion of the manner in which I wish them to be performed, and that most of that peculiarity of character, which I believe, they possess as I sing them myself, is lost in the process they must undergo for publication; but the truth is, that not being sufficiently practised in the rules of composition to rely upon the accuracy of my own harmonic arrangements, I am obliged

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to submit my rude sketches to the eyes of a professor before they can encounter the criticisms of the musical world; and, as it but too often happens that they are indebted for their originality to the violation of some established law, the hand that corrects their errors is almost sure to destroy their character, and the few little flowers they may boast are generally pulled away with the weeds. In singing them myself, however, I pay no such deference to criticism, gut usually give both air and harmony, according to my own first conception of them, with all their original faults, but at the same time, all their original freshness.

Among those who have taken the trouble of revsing my attempts at composition, I have found no one so indulgent to their anomalies as my friend Sir John Stevenson-no one so anxious to reconcile every irregularity to conceal, where he scrupled to correct, my offences against science, and sometimes even to feel with Martial, "simpliciter pateat vitium," rather than risk the loss of a grace by too rigid an amendment of errors. And, after all, perhaps, the mortification I now and then suffer, in seeing the fairy Criticism steal away my wild offspring, and lay some formal-featured changelings of her own in their place, is but a proper punishment for my temerity in venturing into the mazes of

I know I shall be told by the learned musician, that whatever infringes the rules of composition must be disagreeable to the ear, and that according to the pure ethics of the art nothing can possibly be pleasant that is wrong but I am sorry to say that I am lawless enough to disagree with him and have sometimes been even so lost to all sense of musical rectitude, as to take pleasure in a profane succession of fifths!

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