CHAPTER XXXI.
AMERICAN BALLADS.
My American Ballads, perhaps after "Proverbial Philosophy," the chief cause of my Transatlantic popularities, had their origin at Albury.

The first of these and the most famous, as it induced several friendly replies from American poets, was one whereof this below is the first stanza.

I wrote it in 1850, and read it after dinner to four visitors from over the Atlantic to their great delectation, and of course they sent MS.

copies all over the States.

It begins-- _To Brother Jonathan._ "Ho! brother, I'm a Britisher, A chip of heart of oak, That wouldn't warp or swerve or stir From what I thought or spoke; And you--a blunt and honest man, Straightforward, kind, and true, I tell you, brother Jonathan, That you're a Briton too!" I would copy more here, but as the whole ballad (equally with the two just following) is printed in my Miscellaneous Poems and still extant at Paternoster Square, I refer my reader thereto if he wants more of it.
The next of note was one headed "Ye Thirty Noble Nations," and is remarkable for this strange fact, viz., that I composed about the half of those eighteen eight-line stanzas in a semi-slumber.