MILLEDULCIA.

THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE.

HE undoubted author of the monody on the Burial of Sir John Moore, is the late Rev. Charles Wolfe, a young Irishman, curate of Donoughmore, diocese of

Armagh, who died 1823, in the 32d year of his age. His Life and Remains were edited by the Archdeacon of Clogher; and a fifth edition of the volume, which is an 8vo, was published in 1832 by Hamilton, Adams & Co., Paternoster Row. At the twenty-fifth page of the Memoir there is the narration of an interesting discussion between Lord Byron, Shelley, and others, as to the most perfect ode that had ever been produced. Shelley contended for Coleridge's on Switzerland; others named Campbell's Hohenlinden and Lord Byron's Invocation in Manfred. But Lord Byron left the dinner-table before the cloth was removed, and returned with a magazine, from which he read this monody, which just then appeared anonymously. After he had read it, he repeated the third stanza, and pronounced it perfect, and especially the lines

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,

With his martial cloak around him.

"I should have taken the whole," said Shelley, "for a rough sketch of Campbell's."

"No," replied Lord Byron, " Campbell would have claimed it, had it been his."

The Memoir contains the fullest details on the subject of the authorship, Mr. Wolfe's claim to which was also fully established by the Rev. Dr. Miller, late Fellow of Trinity, Dublin, and author of Lectures on the Philosophy of Modern History.

It was stated in an English paper, published in France some few years back, that Wolfe had taken the lines from a poem at the end of the Memoirs of Lally Tollendal, the French governor of Pondicherry, in 1756, and subsequently executed in 1766. In this paper the French poem was given, professing to be a monody on Lally Tollendal, and to be found in the Appendix to his Memoirs. It was only a clever hoax from the ready pen of Father Prout, and first appeared in Bentley's Miscellany. No greater proof of the inconvenience of facetia of this peculiar nature can be required than the circumstance that the fiction, after a time, gets mistaken for a fact: as, in the present case, a statement having been made in the Morning Chronicle that Wolfe was the author of the poem. There shortly afterwards appeared the following letter in The Courier, Wednesday, Nov. 3, 1824.

ODE ON THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE,

To the Editor of the Courier:

SIR,-Permit me, through the medium of your highly respectable journal (which I have chosen as the channel of this communication, from my having been a subscriber to it for the last fifteen years), to observe, that the statement lately published in the Morning Chronicle, the writer of which ascribes the lines on the Burial of Sir John Moore to Woolf, is false, and as barefaced a fabrication as ever was foisted on the public. The lines in question were not written by Woolf, nor by Hailey, nor is Deacoll the author, but they were composed by me. I published them originally some years ago in the Durham County Advertiser, a journal in which I have at different times inserted several poetical trifles, as the "Prisoner's Prayer to Sleep," "Lines on the lamented Death of Benjamin Galley, Esq.," and some other little effusions.

I should not, sir, have thought the lines on Sir John Moore's funeral worth