CHAPTER XII.

SUCCESS OF THE SONG.

Dibdin's Song-Dibdin and the Squire' good fellows well met— Moody a Character after Dibdin's own heart-The Squire's Gift-Incledon-The Shropshire Fox-hunters on the Stage at Drury Lane.

THE reader will have perceived that George Forester and Charles Dibdin were good fellows well met, and that no two men were ever better fitted to appreciate each other. Like the popular monarch of the time, each prided himself upon being a Briton; each admired every new distinguishing trait of nationality, and gloried in any special development of national pluck and daring. No one more than Mr. Forester was ready to endorse that charming bit of history Dibdin gave of his native land in his song of "The snug little Island," or would join more heartily in the chorus:

"Search the globe round, none can be found
So happy as this little island."

No one could have done its geography or have painted the features of its inhabitants in fewer words or stronger colours. We use the word stronger rather than brighter, remembering that Dibdin drew his heroes redolent of tar, of rum, and tobacco. He had the knack of seizing upon broad national characteristics, and, like a true artist, of bringing them prominently into the foreground by means of such simple accessories as seemed to give them force and effect.

In the Willey whipper-in Dibdin found the same unsophisticated bit of primitive nature cropping up which he so successfully brought out in his portraits of salt-water heroes; he found the same spirit differently manifested; for had Moody served in the cock-pit, the gun-room, on deck, or at the windlass, he would have been a "Ben Backstay or a "Poor Jack" from that singleness of aim and daring which actuated him. How clearly Dibdin set forth this sentiment in that stanza of the song of "Poor Jack," in which the sailor, commenting upon the sermon of the chaplain, draws this conclusion:

"D'ye mind me, a sailor should be, every inch,

All as one as a piece of a ship;

And, with her, brave the world without off'ring to flinch,

From the moment the anchor's a-trip.

As to me, in all weathers, all times, tides, and ends,
Nought's a trouble from duty that springs;

My heart is my Poll's, and my

rhino my

And as for my life, 'tis my King's."

friend's,

The country was indebted to this faculty of rhyming for much of that daring and devotion to its interests which distinguished soldiers and sailors at that remarkable period. Dibdin's songs, as he, with pride, was wont to say, were "the solace of sailors on long voyages, in storms, and in battles." His "Tom Moody" illustrated the same pluck and daring which under the vicissitudes and peculiarities of the times had it been Tom's fortune to have served under Drake or Blake, Howe, Jervis, or Nelsonwould equally have supplied materials for a stave.

From the letter of the Squire the reader will see how truthfully the great English Beranger, as he has been called, adhered to the circumstances in his song:

"You all knew Tom Moody, the whipper-in, well.

The bell that's done tolling was honest Tom's knell ;

A more able sportsman ne'er followed a hound

Through a country well known to him fifty miles round.

No hound ever open'd with Tom near a wood,

But he'd challenge the tone, and could tell if it were good;
And all with attention would eagerly mark,

When he cheer'd up the pack, 'Hark! to Rockwood, hark! hark!
Hie!-wind him! and cross him! Now, Rattler, boy! Hark! '