[IRISH, IRELAND] Melodies, Songs, Sacred Songs, and National Airs, Thomas Moore

Moore, Thomas, Esq. Melodies, Songs, Sacred Songs, and National Airs. New-York: Charles Wells, & Co., 1843. [11973]

Black leather, elaborately blind-stamped with a vignette of a lion catching a stag in the center of both covers, "Moore's Melodies" in gilt to the spine, all page edges gilt, 4 1/4 x 2 3/4 inches, tight. Waxed yellow end papers. Steel-engraved frontispiece by Hinshelwood of a man in a mountain setting, lacking tissue guard. Title page is printed in red & black. xv., 260 pages of verse, words only (no music). Moderate foxing throughout. Good. Hardcover.

The majority of these verses pertain to Ireland and the Irish, but not every one. The first entry is A Canadian Boat Song, written on the River St. Lawrence.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852), b. Dublin, Ireland; d. Wiltshire, England. A poet, Moore was known as the "Irish Bard" during his lifetime. His "acclaim rested primarily on the popularity of his Irish Melodies...old Irish tunes verses that spoke to a narrative of Irish dispossession, loss, and resistance. With his romantic work Lalla Rookh (1817), in which these same themes are explored in an elaborate orientalist allegory, Moore achieved wider critical recognition. Translated into several languages, and adapted and arranged for musical performance by, among others, Robert Schumann, the chivalric verse-narrative established Moore as one of the leading exemplars of European romanticism." - wikipedia.

The illustrator is Robert Hinshelwood (1812-ca. 1875), b. Edinburgh, Scotland; d. likely in New York City. An engraver, etcher, and landscape painter, Hinshelwood studied in Scotland before emigrating to New York about the year 1835. He worked for the Harper Brothers and others as a book illustrator, and later for the Continental Bank Note Company. "He is best know for his landscape engravings." - Groce & Wallace, The New-York Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564-1860.