"HOME SWEET HOME."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20490, 15 February 1930, Page 8 (Supplement)

"HOME SWEET HOME."

A correspondence in the English Notes and Queries concerning two newly discovered verses of "Home Sweet Home, recently reprinted on this page reveals sorno interesting facts about the author, John Howard Payne. Tho song, it seems was written in England "as part of tilt libretto of Clari, tho. Maid of Milan, though Payrio was an American by birth, the son of a banker of Now York. " J. 11. P. " writes one correspondent, "was an admirer of, and probably a suitor to, Mary Shelly, tho widow of the poet, who, however, preferred Washington Irving, for whom she had an unrequited tendresse." Payne, dying on April 9, 1852, was buried at Tunis iu the Protestant cemetery, but his rcin'ains were exhumed about thirty years later and taken to his nativo land. Tho name part of "Clari" was taken by Mario Tree at tho first performance, and she was probobly tho first person to sing the words of "Homo Sweet Homo. lho simple lyric of tho words took London by storm," says ono of tho letters in Notes and Queries, -and one hundred thousand copies wore sold iu the first year*