THOMAS MOORE

By

STEPHEN GWYNN

ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.

1905

CONTENTS

[Chapter I]—Boyhood and Early Poems

[Chapter II]—Early Manhood and Marriage

[Chapter III]—"Lalla Rookh"

[Chapter IV]—Period of Residence Abroad

[Chapter V]—Work as Biographer and Controversialist

[Chapter VI]—The Decline of Life

[Chapter VII]—General Appreciation

[Appendix]

[Index]

THOMAS MOORE

CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD AND EARLY POEMS

Sudden fame, acquired with little difficulty, suffers generally a period of obscuration after the compelling power which attaches to a man's living personality has been removed; and from this darkness it does not always emerge. Of such splendour and subsequent eclipse, Moore's fate might be cited as the capital example.

The son of a petty Dublin tradesman, he found himself, almost from his first entry on the world, courted by a brilliant society; each year added to his friendships among the men who stood highest in literature and statesmanship; and his reputation on the Continent was surpassed only by that of Scott and Byron. He did not live to see a reaction. Lord John Russell could write boldly in 1853, a year after his friend's death, that "of English lyrical poets, Moore is surely the greatest." There is perhaps no need to criticise either this attitude of excessive admiration, or that which in many cases has replaced it, of tolerant contempt. But it is as well to emphasise at the outset the fact that even to-day, more than a century after he began to publish, Moore is still one of the poets most popular and widely known throughout the English-speaking world. His effect on his own race at least has been durable; and if it be a fair test of a poet's vitality to ask how much of his work could be recovered from oral tradition, there are not many who would stand it better than the singer of the Irish Melodies. At least the older generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen now living have his poetry by heart.

The purpose of this book is to give, if possible, a just estimate of the man's character and of his work as a poet. The problem, so far as the biographical part is concerned, is not to discover new material but to select from masses already in print. The Memoirs of his Life, edited by Lord John Russell, fill eight volumes, though the life with which they deal was neither long nor specially eventful. In addition we have allusions to Moore, as a widely known social personage, in almost every memoir of that time; and newspaper references by thousands have been collected. These extraneous sources, however, add very little to the impression which is gained by a careful reading of the correspondence and of the long diaries in which Moore's nature, singularly unsecretive, displays itself with perfect frankness. Whether one's aim be to justify Moore or to condemn him, the most effective means are provided by his own words; and for nearly everything that I have to allege in the narrative part of this work, Moore, himself is the authority. Nor is the critical estimate which has to be put forward, though remote from that of Moore's official biographer, at all unlike that which the poet himself seems to have formed of his work.

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on the 28th of May 1779, at No. 12 Aungier Street, where his father, a native of Kerry, kept a grocer's shop. His mother, Anastasia Clodd, was the daughter of a small provision merchant in Wexford. Moore was their eldest child, and of the brothers and sisters whom he mentions, only two girls, his sisters Katherine and Ellen, appear to have grown up or to have played any part in his life. His parents were evidently prosperous people, devoted to their clever boy and ambitious to secure him social promotion by giving scope to the talents which he showed from his early schooldays. The memoir of his youth, which Moore wrote in middle life, notes the special pleasure which his mother took in the friendship of a certain Miss Dodd, an elderly maiden lady moving in "a class of society somewhat of a higher level than ours"; and it is easy enough to understand why the precocious imp of a boy found favour with this distinguished person and her guests. He had all the gifts of an actor and a mimic, and they were encouraged in him first at home, and then at the boarding-school to which he was sent. Samuel Whyte, its head master, had been the teacher of Sheridan, and though he discovered none of Sheridan's abilities, the connection with the Sheridan family, added to his own tastes, had brought him into close touch with the stage. He was the author of a didactic poem on "The Theatre," a great director of private theatricals, and a teacher of elocution. Such a man was not likely to neglect the gifts of the clever small boy entrusted to him, and Master Moore, at the age of eleven, already figured on the playbill of some important private theatricals as reciting the Epilogue. He was encouraged also in the habit of rhyming, a habit that reached back as far as he could remember; and before his fifteenth year was far gone, he attained to the honours of print in a creditable magazine, the Anthologia Hibernica. The first of his contributions was an amatory address to a Miss Hannah Byrne, herself, it appears, a poetess. The lines, "To Zelia on her charging the Author with writing too much on love," need not be quoted (though the subject is characteristic), nor the "Pastoral Ballad" which followed in the number for October 1793. It is worth noting, however, that in 1794 we find Moore paraphrasing Anacreon's Fifth Ode; and further that in March of the same year he is acknowledging his debt to Mr. Samuel Whyte with verses beginning

"Hail heaven-taught votary of the laurel'd Nine"

—an unusual form of address from a schoolboy to his pedagogue.

Briefly, one gathers the impression that Moore's schooldays were enlivened by many small gaieties, while his holidays abounded with the same distractions. The family was sent down to Sandymount, now a suburb, but then a seaside village on Dublin Bay, and there, in addition to sea-bathing, they had their fill of mild play-acting. Moore reproduces some lines from an epilogue written for one of these occasions when the return to school was imminent:—

"Our Pantaloon that did so agéd look
Must now resume his youth, his task, his book;
Our Harlequin who skipp'd, leap'd, danced, and died,
Must now stand trembling by his tutor's side."

And he notes genially how the pathos of his farewell nearly moved him to tears as he recited the closing words—doubtless with a thrilling - tremble in his accents. é Moore was always ἀρτιδακρύς. But he was a healthy, active youngster, and we read that he emulated Harlequin in jumping talents, as well as in the command of tears and laughter; and practised over the rail of a tent-bed till he could at last "perform the headforemost leap of his hero most successfully."

School made little break in these pleasures; for while the family were at the seaside, his indulgent father provided the boy with a pony on which he rode down every Saturday to stay over the Sunday; "and at the hour when I was expected, there generally came my sister with a number of young girls to meet me, and full of smiles and welcomes, walked by the side of my pony into the town." Never was a boy more petted. About this time, too, his musical gifts began to be discovered; for Mrs. Moore insisted that her daughter Katherine should be taught not only the harpsichord, but also the piano, and that a piano should be bought. On this instrument Moore taught himself to play; and since his mother had a pleasant voice and a talent for giving gay little supper-parties, musical people used to come to the house, and the boy had plenty of chances for showing off his accomplishments, accompanying himself, and developing already his uncanny knack of dramatic singing.

A young gentleman thus brought up was, one would say, in a fair way to be spoiled, and Moore, looking back, is quick to recognise the danger. Yet he is fully justified in the comment which closes his narrative of the triumphant entries into Sandymount with schoolgirls escorting his pony:—

"There is far more of what is called vanity in my now reporting the tribute, than I felt then in receiving it; and I attribute very much to the cheerful and kindly circumstances which thus surrounded my childhood, that spirit of enjoyment and, I may venture to add, good temper, which has never, thank God, failed me to the present time (July 1833)."

Moreover, if his parents were interested in his pleasures, they were no less concerned about his work. His mother, he writes, examined him daily in his studies; sometimes even, when kept out late at a party, she would wake the boy out of his sleep in the small hours of morning, and bid him sit up and repeat over his lessons. Her affectionate care met with that return from her son which was continued to the end of her life. There was nothing in his power that Moore would not do to please his mother.

Nevertheless, touching as the relation was, it had its weak side, and Moore in time realised it. In a notable passage of his diary, which describes the pleasant days spent by him at Abbotsford in 1825, we read how he congratulated Scott on the advantages of his upbringing—the open-air life, field sports, and free intercourse with the peasantry.

"I said that the want of this manly training showed itself in my poetry, which would perhaps have had a far more vigorous character, if it had not been for the sort of boudoir education I had received." ("The only thing, indeed," he adds, "that conduced to brace and invigorate my mind was the strong political feelings that were stirring round me when I was a boy, and in which I took a deep and most ardent interest.")

Part of this stirring manifested itself in a secret association under John Moore's own roof; for the son had organised his father's two clerks into a debating and literary society, of which he constituted himself president. The meetings took place after the common meal of the household was over, when the clerks retired to their bedroom, and Master Thomas to his own apartment—a corner of the same bedroom, but boarded off, fitted with a table, chest of drawers, and book-case, and decorated by its owner with inscriptions of his own composition "in the manner, as I flattered myself, of Shenstone at the Leasowes." The secret society met at dead of night in a closet beyond the large bedroom, once or twice a week; and each member was bound to produce a riddle or rebus in verse, which the others were set to solve. And in addition to this more literary part of the proceedings, the members discussed politics—Tom Ennis, the senior clerk, being a strong nationalist.

Politics certainly played a great part in moulding Moore's feelings and imagination, and it should be observed that his nonage almost coincided with the duration of Ireland's independent Parliament. He was three years old when the Volunteers established the freedom of the legislature in College Green, and twenty-one when Pitt and Castlereagh purchased its extinction. His father, as a Catholic, had naturally a keen interest in the great question of reform and Catholic enfranchisement, and Moore remembered being taken by him to a dinner in honour of Napper Tandy, when the hero of the evening noticed the small boy. The Latin usher at Whyte's school too, Mr. Donovan, was an ardent patriot, and in the hours of special instruction which he devoted to the young scholar—for Moore had early outstripped his class-fellows in Latin and Greek—he taught his pupil more than the classics. But these influences bred at most a predisposition. It was Trinity College that made Moore a rebel—or as nearly a rebel as he ever became.

The measure of partial enfranchisement passed in 1793 admitted Catholics to study in the University of Dublin, though its emoluments were denied them. A curious point should be noted here. The entry under June 2, 1794, reads: "Thomas Moore, P. Prot," i.e. Commoner (pensionarius), Protestant. Now Moore himself states that it was for a while debated in the family circle whether he should be entered as a Protestant to qualify him for scholarship, fellowship and the rest; he does not seem to know that a preliminary step was actually taken, quite possibly by his school-master. John Moore's political friends were mostly Protestant ("the Catholics," his son writes, "being still too timorous to come forward openly in their own cause"); the atmosphere into which the student entered was strongly Protestant, the friends whom he made were of the dominant religion. But neither then nor at any time was Moore prepared to change creeds for material advantage. This is the more remarkable because the family's religion was none of the strictest. Moore notes that while at college he abandoned the practice of confession, his mother, after some protest, "very wisely consenting."

Whether owing to the lack of incentive, or because he had no taste for science, then a necessary part of any honours course, Moore troubled little about academic successes, and, after gaining a single premium in his first year, decided to "confine himself to such parts of the course as fell within his own tastes and pursuits." Incidentally he earned distinction for a composition in English verse sent in instead of the prescribed Latin prose; and, needless to say, was busy with less authorised verse-writing. He did, however, in his third year, 1797, present himself for the scholarship examination and was (he says) placed on the list of successful candidates, though his religion disqualified him for enjoyment of the privileges. Records show that on Tuesday, 13th June of that year, thirteen exhibitions were given, supplementary to the list of scholars published on Trinity Monday (the 12th), and on this list Moore stands first. The award was presumably a solatium.

But the serious and lasting part of his university education was gained, as so often happens, not from his tutors but from his associates. The recall of Lord Fitzwilliam in March 1795—"that fatal turning-point in Irish history," as Mr. Lecky calls it—had shattered the hopes of Irish Catholics and made civil war a result to be eagerly urged by extremists on both sides. "The political ferment soon found its way within the walls of our university," writes Moore; and among his personal friends was a young man destined to tragic fame.

"This youth was Robert Emmet, whose brilliant success in his college studies, and more particularly in the scientific portion of them, had crowned his career, as far as he had gone, with all the honours of the course; while his powers of oratory displayed at a debating society, of which, about this time (1796-7), I became a member, were beginning to excite universal attention, as well from the eloquence as the political boldness of his displays. He was, I rather think, by two classes, my senior, though it might have been only by one. But there was, at all events, such an interval between our standings as, at that time of life, makes a material difference; and when I became a member of the debating society, I found him in full fame, not only for his scientific attainments but also for the blamelessness of his life and the grave suavity of his manners."

In the beginning of 1797 this debating club came to an end, and Emmet as well as Moore transferred his energies to the more important Historical Society. Here Moore, by his own account, distinguished himself only as the author of "a burlesque poem called an 'Ode upon Nothing, with Notes by Trismegistus Rustifustius,'" which earned first a medal by general acclamation, and then a vote of censure by reason of the broad licence of certain passages. Emmet, however, was a member of a different kind, and the speeches delivered by him attracted so much attention that a senior man was detailed by the governing Board to attend meetings and answer the young orator. About the same time a paper called The Press was set up by Emmet's elder brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, and other leaders of the United Irishmen; and in this Moore published anonymously a "Letter to the Students of Trinity College." The letter was, by Moore's account of it, treasonable enough, and when, according to custom, he read out the paper to his father and mother at home, they pronounced it to be "very bold." Next day a friend called and made some veiled allusion to the matter, which Moore's mother caught at, and she, says Moore, "most earnestly entreated of me never again to venture on so dangerous a step." Her son promised, and a few days later Emmet's influence was added to the mother's. Moore's account of the circumstance is so characteristic that it must be quoted.

"A few days after, in the course of one of those strolls into the country which Emmet and I used often to take together, our conversation turned upon this letter, and I gave him to understand it was mine; when, with that almost feminine gentleness of manner which he possessed, and which is so often found in such determined spirits, he owned to me that on reading the letter, though pleased with its contents, he could not help regretting that the public attention had been thus drawn to the politics of the University, as it might have the effect of awakening the vigilance of the college authorities, and frustrate the progress of the good work (as we both considered it) which was going on there so quietly. Even then, boyish as my own mind was, I could not help being struck with the manliness of the view which I saw he took of what men ought to do in such times and circumstances, namely, not to talk or write about their intentions, but to act. He had never before, I think, in conversation with me, alluded to the existence of the United Irish societies in college, nor did he now, or at any subsequent time, make any proposition to me to join in them, a forbearance which I attribute a good deal to his knowledge of the watchful anxiety about me which prevailed at home, and his foreseeing the difficulty which I should experience—from being, as the phrase is, constantly 'tied to my mother's apron-strings'—in attending the meetings of the society without being discovered."

It will be seen that Moore makes no claim for heroic conduct. One may assume with great certainty that in such a matter Emmet would not have obeyed a mother's injunctions. But although Moore's parents desired that their son should not go out of his way to incur risks, they were by no means of opinion that he should seek safety at any price. In 1797, on the eve of the rebellion, an inquisition was held within Trinity by Lord Chancellor FitzGibbon. On the first day of the tribunal's sitting, one of Emmet's friends, named Hamilton, refused to answer certain questions, and was sent down with the sentence of banishment from the University, carrying with it exclusion from all the learned professions. Moore went home and discussed the situation that evening.

"The deliberate conclusion which my dear, honest father and mother came to was that, overwhelming as the consequences were to all their prospects and hopes for me, yet if the questions leading to the crimination of others which had been put to almost all examined on that day, and which poor Dacre Hamilton alone refused to answer, should be put also to me, I must in the same manner and at all risks return a similar refusal."

Next day Moore was called, and, after objecting to the oath, took it with the express reservation that he should refuse to answer any question which might criminate his associates. No such question was asked, and his fortitude was not put to the proof, nor does it seem that after this Moore dabbled in rebellion. Five years later, in 1803, when Emmet's abortive rising was nipped in the bud and the young leader went to his death, Moore was in London, preparing to depart for Bermuda. None of the letters preserved from that time contain any reference to this tragedy; but Moore's writings show again and again that the capacity for hero-worship was evoked in him by this friend of boyhood as by no other figure of his time. In the first number of the Irish Melodies, published in 1808, an early place is given to the lyric:—

"O breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonoured his ashes are laid;
Sad, silent, and dark be the tears that we shed,
As the night-dew that falls on the grass o'er his head.
"But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,
Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps;
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls."

Every one, in Ireland at least, who read these lines heard in them an echo of the closing passage in Emmet's speech from the dock:—

"I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world. It is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph. When my country shall have taken her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written."

Emmet's words are established among the scriptures of the Irish people; but it may well be allowed that their fame would be less had not Moore caught up and amplified their thought with all his habitual felicity and more than his habitual passion. Nor is this all. "The Fire Worshippers" is the most characteristic of the four long poems set in the framework of Lalla Rookh, and "The Fire Worshippers" is a glorification of rebellion, which is merely made explicit in the following fine passage:—

"Rebellion! foul, dishonouring word,
Whose wrongful blight so oft has stain'd
The holiest cause that tongue or sword
Of mortal ever lost or gain'd,
How many a spirit, born to bless,
Hath sunk beneath that withering name,
Whom but a day's, an hour's success,
Had wafted to eternal fame!"

More than that, the rebels glorified are men like Emmet, who take up arms as a supreme protest, almost without hope of success.

"Who, though they know the strife is vain,
Who, though they know the riven chain
Snaps but to enter in the heart
Of him who rends its links apart,
Yet dare the issue,—blest to be
Even for one bleeding moment free,
And die in pangs of liberty!"

The affinity is not only between Emmet and the rebel hero Hafed. Hinda, the beloved of Hafed, has many traits that recall Emmet's betrothed, the beautiful and most unhappy Sarah Curran. For although John Philpot Curran was a leading supporter of Grattan's principles, yet no man more bitterly denounced Emmet's attempt; and Al Hassan himself, the fierce Moslem chief, could not have dealt more harshly with Hinda, had he detected her love for the Gheber, than did Curran when he was confronted with the proofs that his daughter continued her affection to a declared rebel. It is not hard to guess of whom Moore thought when he wrote the moving and beautiful lines which describe Hinda's passion in the days after her lover had been revealed to her for the foe of her father's arms:—

"Ah! not the love that should have bless'd
So young, so innocent a breast;
Not the pure, open, prosperous love,
That, pledged on earth and seal'd above,
Grows in the world's approving eyes,
In friendship's smile and home's caress,
Collecting all the heart's sweet ties
Into one knot of happiness!
No, Hinda, no—thy fatal flame
Is nursed in silence, sorrow, shame.—
A passion, without hope or pleasure,
In thy soul's darkness buried deep,
It lies, like some ill-gotten treasure,—
Some idol, without shrine or name,
O'er which its pale-eyed votaries keep
Unholy watch, while others sleep!"

Hafed and Hinda are lovers who find themselves united by all the attraction of their natures, yet separated irretrievably by external circumstances which are, in no small part, of the hero's making. The man is resolute to forfeit, not only life, but the fruition of declared love, sooner than abandon a national cause, even when that cause is most desperate;—the girl sees herself with "a divided duty," torn away by imperious love from all her natural loyalties;—and such lovers also, in Moore's own youth, were Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran. I have quoted the famous lyric in which he consecrates the memory of the man who died for the faith that was in him. Not less famous, and still more beautiful, is the melody which preserves the memory of the surviving lover, and the sad moods of retrospect which were evident in her broken life. Here, more than perhaps in any other poem, Moore has fixed in his words that plangent quality of voice, by which a hundred times he moved listeners to tears.

"She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,
And lovers are round her sighing;
But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying.
"She sings the wild song of her dear native plains,
Every note which he loved awaking:—
Ah! little they think, who delight in her strains,
How the heart of the Minstrel is breaking.
"He had lived for his love, for his country he died,
They were all that to life had entwin'd him;
Nor soon shall the tears of his country be dried,
Nor long will his love stay behind him.
"Oh! make her a grave where the sunbeams rest
When they promise a glorious morrow;
They'll shine o'er her sleep, like a smile from the West,
From her own loved island of sorrow."

With the terrible events of 1798 Moore had no personal concern. His memoir notes that he was ill in bed when the long-expected revolt broke out, and when folks in Dublin were scared by the going out of all the street lamps on the night fixed for an attempt on the metropolis. Yet it is strange how little trace is left in his writings by that bloodstained year. Even in his Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, we seem to find the result of subsequent reading and inquiry, rather than the narrative of one who was almost a man grown when Lord Edward's tragic end moved pity throughout the whole kingdom.

And in truth, though politics were always well to the front among Moore's interests, they never dominated his life. The memoir of his youth notes that even among his political associates other enthusiasms were cultivated. Edward Hudson, one of the Committee of United Irishmen, seized just before the rebellion broke out, was, Moore says, "passionately devoted to Irish music," and had "collected and transcribed all our most beautiful airs." To intercourse with him in these days the poet ascribed much of his own early acquaintance with the chief source of his inspiration. Further, Moore formally completed his education by graduating in 1798, and before this time he had been entered at the Middle Temple by the father of his friend Beresford Burston, a young man of good family and of sporting tastes. But, while still an undergraduate, he had already commenced the composition whose success was to turn him from all serious thoughts of the bar.

The interest of another friend had procured him admission at all seasons to Marsh's Library, and here he plunged deep in miscellaneous reading. We read in the preface to his early volume, Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little, that "Mr. Little" (the supposititious author) "gave much of his time to the study of the amatory writers"; and it is safe to conclude that Mr. Little's original read, in the fine library founded by Archbishop Marsh, whatever the Latin and Greek writers had to say on the subject of gallantry. Here also it is probable that he made acquaintance with what the same preface calls "the graceful levity, the grata protervitas of a Rochester and a Sedley," and there probably he acquired that knowledge of Olympia Fulvia Morata, Alessandra Scala, and the other "Latin blues," which, long after, gave him the rare opportunity "to show off to Macaulay all such reading as he never read." Moore was always a surprising devourer of books, and his parents had profited by the presence of French émigrés to add a good knowledge of modern tongues to his store of classics; a fine memory completed his equipment for the academic side of literature.

Oddly enough, the desire for academic recognition seems to have prompted his first undertaking. Given a young man possessing a good supply of Greek and Latin, a large fund of miscellaneous knowledge, a strong taste for the amatory poets, and a remarkably neat turn with verse, it was natural enough that he should turn to translation of the classics. Anacreon, who had engaged his attention in schooldays, still held it: and about the time of his graduating, Moore went to the Provost of Trinity, Dr. Kearney, with a good handful of renderings from that poet, and suggested that his industry should be recognised by "some honour or reward." Dr. Kearney was sympathetic and flattering, but at the same time "expressed his doubts whether the Board could properly confer any public reward upon the translation of a work so amatory and convivial as the Odes of Anacreon." Nevertheless, he strongly advised publication, adding, with an agreeable touch of nature, "The young people will like it." It may be added that, when publication came to be arranged, Dr. Kearney was one of the only two subscribers found among "the monks of Trinity," as Moore contemptuously called them; and further, that he appears to have lent to the young poet his copy of Spaletti's edition—one of two sent from the Pope to Trinity College by the intermediacy of the Catholic Archbishop Troy.

This, however, is to anticipate. It was in the spring of April 1799 that Mr. Thomas Moore set out to eat his first dinner at the Middle Temple. The proceeds of the little grocery business—of which Moore never was ashamed, and which never seems to have been a hindrance to him in society—were now to be sharply taxed. Mrs. Moore had long been hoarding against the journey to London, to gather the guineas which she now sewed up in the waistband of the adventurer's pantaloons. In some other part of the garments, "unknown to me" (Moore writes), "she had stitched in a scapular, a small piece of cloth blessed by the priest, which a fond superstition inclined her to believe would keep the wearer of it from harm." The journey was accomplished successfully, and quarters were found for the traveller at 44 George Street, Portman Square, by some Irish acquaintances. Except for his Irish connections, most of them people in a small way of life, apothecaries and the like, Moore was rather friendless in town. The custom of the Temple obliging each novice, as part of the form of initiation, to give a dinner to some brother Templars, embarrassed him at first, since he did not know a soul; and he was only relieved "by a young fellow, who, addressing me very politely, offered to collect for me the number of diners generally used on such occasions." It seems that he felt despondent, and a letter to his father suggests that he wrote querulously, asking leave to return home and give up the game. It is certain that he was immeasurably homesick, and each one of his letters to "my dearest father" and "my darling mother" teems with expressions of eagerness for the sight of them.

Nevertheless he was making his way, and, before a month was over, could write, "I need never be out of company if I chose it." He had formed also one of the two or three connections which dominated his life. Joseph Atkinson, secretary in Ireland to the Ordnance Board, who had made friends with the young singer in Dublin, gave him an introduction to Lord Moira (afterwards the second Marquis of Hastings). Moore, a few days after arriving, called on the great man, and was invited to dinner; the acquaintance must have progressed rapidly, for in the same year he was invited to pay a visit to Donington Park, Lord Moira's country seat, on his way back from spending the summer vacation in Ireland.

"This was of course at that time," Moore observes with that good-humoured candour which is a characteristic of him, "a great event in my life, and among the most vivid of my early English recollections is that of my first night at Donington, when Lord Moira, with that high courtesy for which he was remarkable, lighted me himself to my bedroom; and there was this stately personage stalking on before through the long lighted gallery, bearing in his hand my bed-candle which he delivered to me at the door of my apartment. I thought it all exceedingly fine and grand, but at the same time most uncomfortable, and little I foresaw how much at home and at my ease I should one day find myself in that great house."

After this visit, negotiations with a publisher for the issue of the Anacreon, which had been begun during Moore's first sojourn in London, were resumed, and probably the name of friendship with Lord Moira did no harm. At all events the business was conducted to a successful issue by Moore's friend, Dr. Hume; and on December 19, 1799, the new poet writes rapturously of getting a good number of names for the subscription, adding that he has "received two hard guineas already from Mr. Campbell and Mr. Tinker, which I hope will be lucky. They are the only guineas I ever kissed, and I have locked them up religiously." Dr. Lawrence, a scholar of repute, reported favourably of the translation. Mrs. Fitzherbert was added to the list of subscribers; and finally, to crown all, Moore wrote—

"My dear Mother, I have got the Prince's name and his permission that I should dedicate Anacreon to him. Hurra! Hurra!"

And before the translator returned to the home where he was so eagerly expected, he had been duly presented to "his Royal Highness, George Prince of Wales." "He is beyond doubt a man of very fascinating manners," the letter goes on (dated August 4, 1800); and indeed the Prince's remarks, as Moore reports them, were vastly civil:—

"The honour was entirely his in being allowed to put his name 'to a work of such merit.' He then said that he hoped when he returned to town in the winter, we should have many opportunities of enjoying each other's society; that he was passionately fond of music and had long heard of my talents in that way. Is not all this very fine?"

Very fine indeed. "But, my dearest mother, it has cost me a new coat. By-the-bye, I am still in my other tailor's debt." There one has in a nutshell the epitome of Moore's life, if the life were to be written from a hostile point of view. On the other hand, considered candidly, there is nothing more surprising than the small degree of harm done to Moore by his disproportionate success. For the son of a small Irish tradesman to find himself at the age of one-and-twenty flattered by the heir-apparent—at a time too when the heir-apparent was the all-conquering leader of society—was indeed a dazzling promotion. And from that day onwards, Moore never lost ground. He had through life his choice of whatever was most brilliant in social intercourse, and his choice showed a steadily growing sanity of judgment. Moreover, although his intimates were always people set on a pinnacle, he never for an instant wavered in his fidelity to the home where he had been brought up with so much love. The end of the letter which describes his introduction to the Prince deserves to be quoted for its natural warmth:—

"Do not let any one read this letter but yourselves; none but a father and a mother can bear such egotising vanity; but I know who I am writing to—that they are interested in what is said of me, and that they are too partial not to tolerate my speaking of myself."

It is easy to see that Moore's success was mainly social at first rather than literary. Throughout life he exercised an irresistible charm. An infectious gaiety, joined to copious but never ill-natured wit, made his company desired by all; and his physical presence, though not striking, was always agreeable. Diminutive in size, and plain of feature, he gained something approaching beauty by the constant play of expression centred in his vivacious eyes and the mobile and beautiful mouth. More distinctive still, in youth at least, was his hair, which curled in long tendrils over his head. But the special charm which he exercised,—and it was doubtless of greater importance in youth, before his powers as a talker had matured—lay in a gift for singing, which appears to have been something peculiar to himself. He sang always to his own accompaniment, and the performance by all accounts approached declamation rather than ordinary song. Moore is the only poet of modern times who, like the ancient bards, lent to his own verses the added charm of musical expression. Poet first, musician afterwards, he gave the words for all they were worth, and he seems always to have counted it a failure, if there were no wet eyes among his hearers.

To this gift, nearer the actor's than either the musician's or the poet's, he owed probably the suddenness of his fame. It called attention to his literature; but the attention was well deserved, for this boyish production was notable, coming when it did.

In 1800, when the Odes of Anacreon appeared, Wordsworth and Coleridge had, it is true, published Lyrical Ballads. The revolution in taste had begun. Yet these fighters in the van beat heavily upon an armed opposition; and for the moment the tradition of Pope, as modified in different directions by Gray and Goldsmith, was passionately upheld against them. Burns, indeed, had already made a great breach in the solid academic phalanx, and had won through to acceptance. But newcomers, who preached such doctrines as were set out in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, roused fierce hostility; they came with their mouths full of arguments. Moore, on the other hand, troubled no man with controversy, yet was hardly more academic than they. Like them, he boldly discarded the eighteenth-century manner, still flourishing in the hands of Crabbe. "The early poets of our language," says the preface to Little's Poems, "were the models which Mr. Little selected for imitation." A glance at the Anacreon will show the truth of this observation. Take the third ode—

Listen to the Muse's lyre,
Master of the pencil's fire!
Sketch'd in painting's bold display,
Many a city first portray,
Many a city revelling free,
Warm with loose festivity.
Picture then a rosy train,
Bacchants straying o'er the plain,
Piping, as they roam along,
Roundelay or shepherd-song.
Paint me next, if painting may
Such a theme as this portray,
All the happy heaven of love
Which these blessed mortals prove.

Here the suggestion, if not of Fletcher's manner, at least of some manner contemporary with Fletcher, is unmistakable. But since the verses were put forward without comment, no one thought of objecting. It is like the fable of the Wind and the Sun: Moore's genial example relaxed the bonds of 'correctness' by far more quickly than Wordsworth's austere theorising.

The easy way is seldom so good as the hard way, and no one would put Moore's early work into comparison with the wonderful volume that was the fruit of the years spent by Wordsworth and Coleridge at Nether Stowey. Yet it is only just to emphasise the fact that Moore was the first to bring back to English that note of song, natural even in its artificiality, which is heard all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but, except by Blake, was never sounded during the eighteenth. One can readily imagine the delight with which a generation, nursed on Cowper and Crabbe, turned to these facile yet not vulgar harmonies. And the work, though seemingly so easy, was wrought with delicate care; Lord Moira noted, and Moore gratefully recorded the praise, that few among the best poets had been so strictly grammatical! Always a careful craftsman, Moore never worked harder than on this first attempt. But his labour detracted nothing from the flush of youth, the zest for enjoyment, which pervades the lines. 'The young people will like it,' probably in any generation, whenever they chance to read it.

Moore, however, could never reconcile himself to effacing altogether the traces of his study. Lalla Rookh testifies to his passion for footnotes, and the same unfortunate itch displays itself already in the Anacreon. We find him quoting, not only Ronsard and Lessing—a wide range for one-and-twenty—but commentators and authors by far more recondite—Cornelius de Pauw, the poetess Veronica Cambara, the Epistles of Alciphron, together with Aulus Gellius and Angerianus. One must remember, however, that Moore's age had a taste for what we should dismiss as pedantry—witness the polyglot jesting of Father Prout; and he doubtless obeyed a wise instinct when he opened his prefatory remarks in a manner worthy of the gentleman whom Dr. Primrose met in jail:—

"There is but little known with certainty of the life of Anacreon. Chamæleon Heracleotes, who wrote upon the subject, has been lost in the general wreck of ancient literature."

In the next publication, which followed rapidly upon the success of the first, Moore dispensed with erudition. Censorious people shook their heads over the Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little, Esq., and it must be allowed that the censure had some justification. In the remarks upon Anacreon, Moore had praised that poet because "his descriptions are warm; but the warmth is in the ideas not the words." There is certainly no grossness in the words of Mr. Thomas Little, but there is considerable warmth in his ideas—and indeed what could be more natural? Moore was an exceedingly healthy normal young man, strongly attracted towards the other sex, but exempt from any vehemences of passion. The tone of these lyrics is rather that of the Restoration poets than of the earlier Caroline school; there is prettiness, elegance, gaiety, rather than beauty; and, as in all his models, there is preoccupation rather with a sex than an individual. It is amatory poetry, not love-poetry; but in its own kind, it is as good as can be found. What could be better than

"Still the question I must parry,
Still a wayward truant prove,
Where I love I cannot marry,
Where I marry cannot love."

No other poet for a hundred years had got such elasticity and gaiety out of English rhythms as were to be found in these two early volumes. One need not claim high rank for this sort of poetry, but it would be ignorant to overlook the service which Moore was doing to all who after him came to handle English metre.

So much for his successes. The second volume is also interesting with records of his failures. The "Fragments of College Exercises" show a futile attempt to wield the heroic couplet with sonorous rhetoric. And in two other poems, Reuben and Rose and The Ring, we find Moore wandering off after the fashion of the German spectral ballad:—

"'Twas Reuben, but ah! he was deathly and cold,
And fleeted away like the spell of a dream."

And so on, with cold carcases and other properties of this form of composition, to which the poet never returned—wisely recognising that it was not for him to make readers' flesh creep.

In the meantime, while the Anacreon was passing into its second edition, and Little's Poems were making their appearance, Moore stayed in England, and his connection with Lord Moira grew closer. A great part of the year 1801 seems to have been spent by him at Donington, sometimes alone, when he worked hard in the library, shot rooks, repaired his complexion and slept sweetly, "not dreaming of ambition, though under the roof of an earl." In 1802 he had hopes of Lord Moira's coming into administration. But Lord Moira did not come in, and though considerable sums were earned by the Poems, Moore was obliged to borrow from his mother's brother. In the early part of 1803 a proposal was made to him, by Wickham, then Chief Secretary for Ireland, on behalf of the Irish Government. An Irish laureateship was to be established, with the same salary as the English, for the young Irish poet; the movers in this matter were Lord Moira and the always friendly Joe Atkinson. Our most definite record of the transaction is a letter from Moore to his mother, which makes it clear that he himself was prepared to accept the "paltry and degrading stipend," but was deterred by a letter from his father, which unfortunately we do not possess. The motive which he alleges was "the urging apprehension that my dears at home wanted it"; but since he was reassured that they stood in no instant necessity, he declined the offer. The letter however makes it perfectly clear that he looked forward at this time to a post provided by Government: legal studies in the meantime having lapsed.

These expectations were not wholly disappointed. In August Lord Moira's interest secured for him a place as registrar of a naval prize-court at Bermuda—an employment whose profits depended upon an active state of war in and about the West Indies.

The idea of so complete a separation from his home distressed him, and he tried to keep the facts from his mother as long as possible—discussing the project only by letters to his father and uncle. But on August 16th, John Moore—wrote to his son an admirable epistle (the only one from his pen that is preserved),—which deprecated the attempt to keep Mrs. Moore in the dark:—

"There could be no such deception carried on with her where you, or indeed any one of her family, were concerned, for she seems to know everything respecting them by instinct. It would not be doing her the justice she well deserves to exclude her from such confidence.... For my particular part, I think with you, that there is a singular chance, as well as a special interference of Providence, in your getting so honourable a situation at this very critical time.[1] I am sure no one living can possibly feel more sensibly than your poor mother and me do, at losing that comfort we so long enjoyed, of at least hearing from you once every week of your life that you were absent from us; for surely no parents had ever such happiness in a child; and much as we regret the wide separation which this situation of yours will for some time cause between us, we give you our full concurrence, and may the Almighty God spare and prosper you as you deserve."

Preparations went through quickly, and on September 22, 1803, Moore wrote, from Portsmouth, his "heart's farewell to the dear darlings at home." Carpenter, the publisher, had made advances which rendered departure possible, and so

"now all is smooth for my progress, and Hope sings in the shrouds of the ship that is to carry me. Good-by. God bless you all, dears of my heart."

[1] This was just after Emmet's rising.

CHAPTER II

EARLY MANHOOD AND MARRIAGE

The Phaeton frigate, on which Moore had procured a passage, left Spithead on September 25th, and on November 5th we find him writing to his mother from Norfolk in Virginia. The voyage, though rather rough, had been a pleasant experience, and, after his fashion, Moore had made friends with everybody on board. Thirty years later he was delighted with a passage in the Naval Recollections of Captain Scott, who had sailed as midshipman on the Phaeton. Scott's observation was, that he knew at that time nothing about Moore's poetry, but that the poet "appeared the life and soul of the company, and the loss of his fascinating society was frequently and loudly lamented by the officers long after he had quitted us in America." Moore was justifiably proud of having "left such an impression upon honest hearty unaffected fellows like those of the gun-room of the Phaeton," who would naturally—as he freely admits—have been prejudiced in the other sense. "I remember," he notes, "the first lieutenant saying to me after we had become intimate, 'I thought you the first day you came aboard, the damnedest conceited little fellow I ever saw, with your glass cocked up to your eye'; and then he mimicked the manner in which I made my first appearance." The first lieutenant's phrase is worth remembering as a frank piece of description.

Till the end of 1803 Moore was delayed in Virginia, waiting for a ship, and in the meanwhile writing long letters home full of the warmest affection, and of "longing for news of all his dears." In January he was lucky enough to get passage on another ship of war, the Driver, and reached Bermuda after seven days' sail in very heavy weather. His parting from Norfolk had been attended with the usual regrets; Mrs. Hamilton, wife of the British Consul, in whose home Moore had been most hospitably entertained, "cried, and said she never parted from any one so reluctantly," and her husband wrote him all possible letters of introduction.

Bermuda itself seemed, at the first view, a kind of fairyland, as he has recorded in the Epistle to Lady Donegal:—

"The morn was lovely, every wave was still,
When the first perfume of a cedar-hill
Sweetly awaked us, and, with smiling charms,
The fairy harbour woo'd us to its arms.
Gently we stole, before the languid wind,
Through plantain shades, that like an awning twined
And kiss'd on either side the wanton sails,
Breathing our welcome to these vernal vales;
While, far reflected o'er the wave serene,
Each wooded island shed so soft a green,
That the enamour'd keel, with whispering play,
Through liquid herbage seem'd to steal its way!
Never did weary bark more sweetly glide,
Or rest its anchor in a lovelier tide!
Along the margin, many a shining dome,
White as the palace of a Lapland gnome,
Brighten'd the wave;—in every myrtle grove
Secluded, bashful, like a shrine of love,
Some elfin mansion sparkled through the shade;
And, while the foliage interposing play'd,
Wreathing the structure into various grace,
Fancy would love, in glimpses vague, to trace
The flowery capital, the shaft, the porch,
And dream of temples, till her kindling torch
Lighted me back to all the glorious days
Of Attic genius; and I seem'd to gaze
On marble, from the rich Pentelic mount,
Gracing the umbrage of some Naiad's fount."

The letter which sketches his first impressions adds a touch of disenchantment, which Moore, remote always from realism, was careful to exclude from his verse:—

"These little islands are thickly covered with cedar groves, through the vistas of which you catch a few pretty white houses, which my poetical short-sightedness always transforms into temples; and I often expect to see Nymphs and Graces come tripping from them, when I find, to my great disappointment, that a few miserable negroes is all 'the bloomy flush of life' it has to boast of."

What was more serious, the prospects of income also disenchanted him of his dream which was to make in Bermuda a home for himself and his family. So many prize-courts had been established, and so few causes were referred to his in Bermuda, that nothing but a Spanish war could hold out a prospect of large fees. Even that did not promise an income worth staying for, and Moore's decision was immediate—to finish the work he was engaged on for Carpenter, and then set out for home.

The precise nature of this engagement is not clear. He had from his first year in London been writing songs which were set to music by John Stevenson and others. In 1803 the poem from Anacreon, "Give me the Harp of Epic Song," had been arranged by Stevenson as a glee, and its performance by the Irish Harmonic Club so pleased Lord Hardwicke, then Viceroy, that he conferred a knighthood on the composer. Moore's last letter on leaving England contained directions for collecting his songs to be published together, and the letters from Bermuda made constant reference to this project, which, however, was never executed. In the meantime, as his work testifies, he was busy writing verses; even aboard ship, he had not been idle. And, as usual, his verse writing was largely amatory. Later in life, he records with some amusement that a lady in Bermuda was pointed out as the original "Nea" to whom several poems are addressed, and he wonders if they had hit on the right person, adding that there were at least two who had a claim.

Festivities, as a matter of course, surrounded him, and he was happy as a king, but for one lack. Up till March 19th, no letter had reached him from Ireland.

"Oh darling mother," he cries, "six months now and I know as little of home as of things most remote from my heart and recollection.... The signal post which announces when any vessels are in sight of the island is directly before my window, and often do I look to it with a heart sick 'from hope deferred.'"

In the end of April he left his post, having, in an evil hour, appointed a deputy to discharge its duties and share the profits. The Boston frigate took him to New York, and its captain, John Douglas, afterwards admiral, formed a friendship with the poet of which proofs were given again and again. In 1811, he met Moore in London, after five years had passed without a word or a letter exchanged. Douglas had just come into a legacy of ten thousand pounds, and was going to sea with seven hundred pounds standing to his name in Coutts's.

"Now, my dear little fellow," he said, "here is a blank check, which you may fill up while I am away, for as much of that as you may want."

Moore, who declined the offer, as he declined many others of like nature, might well comment on a man's "bringing back the warmth of friendship so unchilled after an absence of five years." Nor was that the end of it. In 1814 Douglas, then Admiral on the Jamaica Station, offered Moore the Secretaryship, "in case of war a sure fortune," with a house and land to be at the poet's disposal; and, as Moore notes, the offer was not only friendly but courageous, for Douglas owed his appointment to Court interest, and at that moment the Whig satirist was in the worst odour with the Regent and all his surroundings.

The immediate boon, gladly accepted, of the passage from Bermuda to America, and thence to England, was the more important, as it enabled Moore to devote the money, which had been set aside for his passage, to seeing the New World. He sailed from New York to Norfolk, and thence set out for Baltimore; and the journey in American stage coaches appears to have shaken out of him whatever remained of his early illusions about the "land of the free." America at that time was beyond dispute inchoate, amorphous, and ugly in all senses, and Moore's instincts were anything but democratic. At Philadelphia, "the only place in America which can boast of any literary society," he found his writings well known, and met with a flattering reception, which pleased him; a Mrs. Hopkinson in particular showed him attentions which elicited the poem, "Alone by the Schuylkill a wanderer roved." Returning to New York, he found that the Boston must go to Halifax, and could not sail before August. This offered an opportunity of journeying to Canada overland, and accordingly he sailed up the Hudson River, through "the most bewildering succession of romantic objects that I could ever have conceived." The Oneida Indians charmed him by their courtesy, the rivers and virgin forests wrought upon his sensibilities, and when he came within hearing of the roar of Niagara, it seemed to him dreadful that "any heart born for sublimities should be doomed to breathe away its hours amidst the miniature productions of this world without seeing what shapes Nature can assume, what wonders God can give birth to."

The sight, not so much of the falls as of "the mighty flow descending with calm magnificence" towards them, moved him passionately; and the journey, "seventeen hundred miles of rattling and tossing, through woods, lakes, rivers, etc.," did him good. He reached Quebec much gratified by many kindnesses. The captain of the vessel which carried him across Lake Ontario refused to take money from the poet, and a poor watchmaker at Niagara insisted that a job done should be accepted "as the only mark of respect he could pay to one he had heard so much of but never expected to meet with." At Halifax more proofs of what, later in life, he called, with great justice, his "friendly fame," greeted him, in the shape of courtesies from the Governors of Lower Canada and of Nova Scotia. It is Moore's great distinction that he gave real pleasure to all sorts and conditions of men; and they showed it by treating him as if he had conferred obligations on them. The feeling which is to-day so widespread among his countrymen animated in his lifetime all the English-speaking world. Yet it is surprising to read such instances of widespread celebrity when we remember that at this time he was the author only of translations from a pseudo-classic, and of a small volume of verses, not explicitly acknowledged, and by no means wholly decorous.

His American experiences ended about a year after he left Europe, and on November 12, 1804, he dated his letter rapturously "Plymouth, Old England once more." "Oh dear," he goes on, "to think that in ten days I may see a letter from home, written but a day or two before, warm from your hands, and with your very breath almost upon it, instead of lingering out month after month without a gleam of intelligence, without anything but dreams."

Nevertheless, a good many months elapsed before the returned exile could make his way home. London held out open arms to him; the Prince was very friendly; "every one I ever knew in this big city seems delighted to see me back in it." And so, although in January 1805 he was hoping that six weeks would see the end of his labours on the forthcoming volume that was to clear off all obligations, August found him still urging the necessity of finishing his work without any avoidable delay. It seems that he went home to Dublin in the autumn, and Lord Moira, then Commander-in-Chief in Scotland, wrote a letter accepting the dedication of the forthcoming Epistles and Odes, in the most honorific language.

The next year, 1806, saw the formation of the Ministry of "All the Talents," and for a moment it seemed as if Moira would be included. His protégé's hopes ran high, but they were dashed. A small appointment was offered to Moore, but refused by him on the ground that it would be "better to wait till something worthier both of his generosity and my ambition should occur"; and at the same time the young man suggested that it would be a simpler matter to find an appointment for his father, and that such a favour would earn even more gratitude. Lord Moira at once acted on the suggestion, and John Moore was appointed to a barrack-mastership in Dublin. But Moore by no means relinquished hopes of the Irish commissionership which still dangled before his eyes, and the letters to his most intimate friends of this period, Lady Donegal and her sister, Miss Godfrey, abound with references to his expectations. Nevertheless, he had fully made up his mind, once the new poems were fairly launched, to return to Ireland and leave his interests in Lord Moira's care, when an unforeseen event led to one of the best-known passages in his life.

It arose from the publication in 1806 of the new volume, Epistles, Odes, and other Poems. Carpenter evidently laid out money on the production of this quarto, with its frontispiece representing the Phaeton under sail off the peak of the Azores; and his expectations were not disappointed. The Epistles contained in the volume, nine in number, were impressions of travel on shipboard and on land; the best is certainly that to Lady Donegal (already quoted), which describes the arrival at Bermuda; and perhaps the best known is that to Atkinson, from which a few lines may be given:—

"'Twas thus, by the shade of the Calabash Tree,
With a few, who could feel and remember like me,
The charm, that to sweeten my goblet I threw,
Was a tear to the past and a blessing on you!
"Oh! say, do you thus, in the luminous hour
Of wine and of wit, when the heart is in flower,
And shoots from the lip, under Bacchus's dew,
In blossoms of thought ever springing and new—
Do you sometimes remember, and hallow the brim
Of your cup with a sigh, as you crown it to him
Who is lonely and sad in these valleys so fair,
And would pine in elysium, if friends were not there?"

More immediate notice than was bestowed on these passages of mingled description and sentiment fell to the three epistles in which Moore for the first time tried his hand at satire,—moved to it by the corruptions of the young Republic, where he found

"All youth's transgression with all age's chill
The apathy of wrong, the bosom's ice,
A slow and cold stagnation into vice."

These experiments in satire of the accepted type, written in Pope's metre, have, however, no more permanent value than the two odes, equally academic—one upon the "Fall of Hebe" and one described as a "Fragment of a Mythological Hymn to Love." It is safe to say that the book owed its very wide popularity to the songs and shorter lyrics. Two of the songs had an immense vogue—"The Woodpecker" and the still popular "Canadian Boat-song" ("Faintly as tolls the evening chime"), written to an air suggested to Moore by the chant of his oarsmen as he travelled down the St. Lawrence.

In addition to these were a number of amatory verses, some of them at least as well calculated to scandalise as anything in the posthumous works of Mr. Little. It is true that, read to-day, these do not seem to call for any extreme censure. They are glorifications expressly of fugitive loves, dwelling rather on pleasure than on passion, and one might argue whether they were the more or the less dangerous on that account. But there is no doubt that Moore maintained the reputation which he had earned for licentious poetry. Those who wished to rebuke Byron's first indiscretions called him "a young Moore." It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the Edinburgh Review, in its character of censor morum, having passed over the Anacreon and Little's Poems, should come heavily down upon this renewed offence—describing Moore as "the most licentious of modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who in our time have devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality." But the second paragraph of the article went beyond fair bounds when it attributed to Moore "a cold-blooded attempt to corrupt the purity of unknown and unsuspecting readers." Jeffrey had a right to say that the poet blended mere sensuality with the language "of exalted feeling and tender emotion"; but no critic can endorse the offensive passage in which he describes Moore as "stimulating his jaded fancy for new images of impurity." The best apology for whatever in the book needs excuse, is that Moore gave in his verse too ready an outlet to the ordinary exuberances of a pleasure-loving young man's temperament, and that he seldom pretended to conceal the transitory nature of his feelings.

And, in the sequel, Jeffrey admitted in writing that he had been too severe. A good deal, however, had happened first. Moore's first impulse does not seem to have been belligerent, and as the purpose of calling Jeffrey out dawned on him, there dawned also a difficulty. Jeffrey was probably in Scotland (a letter from Moore to George Thomson, editor of Select Scottish Airs, etc., contains an inquiry as to his whereabouts), and this seemed to involve a journey to Edinburgh for which "the actual but too customary state of my finances" (Moore writes in the memoir of this transaction) "seriously disabled me." But, on coming to London, he learnt from Rogers that Jeffrey was also in town, and on ascertaining the fact, immediately went to look for a second. The friend to whom he first addressed himself having counselled delay, the affair was entrusted to Dr. Hume, and a cartel was written in such terms that there could be only one answer. Jeffrey referred Hume to Horner, and a meeting was fixed for the next morning at Chalk Farm. But neither combatant possessed pistols, and it was left for Moore to borrow them from a friend. Moreover, on reaching the ground, Hume found that Jeffrey's second knew nothing of firearms, and the task of loading both pistols was entrusted to him; while in the meantime the two principals, left together, walked up and down, conversing very agreeably. Presently the seconds returned and placed their men; but, as the pistols were raised, police officers jumped from an ambush. The lender of the pistols had been indiscreet and revealed the secret over-night at Lord Fincastle's dinner-table; Lord Fincastle had immediately communicated with Bow Street, with the result that early next morning the poet and his critic found themselves in durance till bail was given.

So far, nothing very remarkable had happened. But Moore, after going away, remembered that he had left the pistols behind, and returned to get them. The officer, however, refused to give them up, and made the disagreeable explanation that foul play was suspected; a bullet having been found in Moore's pistol, but none in that taken from Jeffrey. To make matters worse, a report in the newspapers substituted the word "pellet" for "bullet," and pleasantries were rife about author and critic fighting with pellets of paper. Moore was furious, and persuaded Horner to draw up an account of the matter, to be signed by the two seconds, but Hume "took fright at the ridicule brought upon us by the transaction" and refused to have any more to do with it. More than thirty years elapsed before Moore was reconciled to the friend who thus failed him, and his wrath was not unreasonable, since the explanation published by himself in the Times naturally carried little weight. Yet it afterwards gave him ground for challenging Byron. Thus closely connected are Moore's two attempts at duelling; and there is nothing more characteristic of his life than the fact that in each case his challenge was only the introduction to a friendship of the sincerest and most honourable kind.

After the close of this episode Moore returned to Dublin,—some hackwork for Carpenter on Sallust defraying his expenses—and remained there till the spring of 1807, reading daily in Marsh's library for about three hours and a half. "I have written nothing since I came here," he tells Miss Godfrey—dating his letter Dublin, February 23rd—"except one song which everybody says is the best I have ever composed." The exception is notable, for this song may have been one of the first of the Irish Melodies.

The inception of Moore's most famous work was due to a publisher's suggestion. In 1797 (or perhaps a year earlier), Bunting's collection of Irish Airs had been issued, and Moore tells us that his interest in them was encouraged by his friend Edward Hudson. Even before his departure for Bermuda the young Irish poet had shown his skill in fitting words for singing; and songs by him had been issued by Carpenter, by Rhames of Dublin, and by other firms. When he returned home after an absence which extended from the summer of 1803 to the autumn of 1806, he returned with fame greatly augmented by his latest volume, and presumably the vogue of his singing was not less in Dublin than elsewhere. What the song was that he refers to in his letter to Miss Godfrey, we do not know; but it is exceedingly likely to have been the lines on Emmet, which occupied a prominent place in the first number of the Melodies. One can very well believe that the fame of some song by Moore on an Irish theme may have suggested to William Power, owner of a music warehouse in Dublin, the proposal which he made—namely, that Moore should collaborate with Sir John Stevenson in producing a series of Irish Melodies.

The following prefatory letter, addressed by Moore to Stevenson, was issued by the publisher in his preliminary announcement to the first and second numbers:—

"I feel very anxious that a work of this kind should be undertaken. We have too long neglected the only talent for which our English neighbours ever deigned to allow us any credit. Our National Music has never been properly collected; and while the composers of the Continent have enriched their Operas and Sonatas with Melodies borrowed from Ireland—very often without even the honesty of acknowledgment—we have left these treasures, in a great degree, unclaimed and fugitive. Thus our Airs, like too many of our countrymen, have, for want of protection at home, passed into the service of foreigners. But we are come, I hope, to a better period of both Politics and Music; and how much they are connected, in Ireland at least, appears too plainly in the tone of sorrow and depression which characterizes most of our early Songs.

"The task which you propose to me, of adapting words to these airs, is by no means easy. The Poet, who would follow the various sentiments which they express, must feel and understand that rapid fluctuation of spirits, that unaccountable mixture of gloom and levity, which composes the character of my countrymen, and has deeply tinged their Music. Even in their liveliest strains we find some melancholy note intrude—some minor Third or flat Seventh—which throws its shade as it passes, and makes even mirth interesting. If Burns had been an Irishman (and I would willingly give up all our claims upon Ossian for him), his heart would have been proud of such music, and his genius would have made it immortal.

"Another difficulty (which is, however, purely mechanical) arises from the irregular structure of many of those airs, and the lawless kind of metre which it will in consequence be necessary to adapt to them. In these instances, the Poet must write, not to the eye, but to the ear; and must be content to have his verses of that description which Cicero mentions, 'Quos si cantu spoliaveris nuda remanebit oratio.' That beautiful Air, 'The Twisting of the Rope,' which has all the romantic character of the Swiss Ranz des Vaches, is one of those wild and sentimental rakes which it will not be very easy to tie down in sober wedlock with Poetry. However, notwithstanding all these difficulties, and the very moderate portion of talent which I can bring to surmount them, the design appears to me so truly National, that I shall feel much pleasure in giving it all the assistance in my power."

Leicestershire, Feb. 1807.

The date is curious. Moore, writing to Miss Godfrey on February 23rd from Dublin, made no mention of this project. He certainly crossed in the end of February, and took up his abode (as was now his recognised privilege) in solitary state at Donington. From there he wrote to his mother for a copy of Bunting's Airs, and also of Miss Owenson's—to be got from Power. In April he sends her "an inclosure for Power" to be forwarded immediately—and this was probably the prefatory letter. For Mr. Andrew Gibson's researches have discovered in the Belfast Commercial Chronicle of May 28, 1807, a paragraph relating to Power's projected "Collection of the best Original Irish Melodies," which concludes by citing a portion of Moore's prefatory letter, and the date affixed is "Leicestershire, April 1807."

For what reason the month should be given as February in all published editions of the Melodies, it is hard to conceive. But the result has been a widespread bibliographical error, since the publication is always assigned to 1807. Mr. Gibson, however, has unearthed various announcements in the Freeman's Journal, of which two speak in October of the work as "shortly to be published," and another, on April 8th, 1808, as "just published." The latter advertisement invited subscribers for "the succeeding numbers"; names were to be given to the publisher, William Power, in Dublin, or in London to his brother James Power, who had recently established a similar place of business in the Strand.

Under the original scheme, Moore was only to have been one of "several distinguished Literary Characters" from whom "Power has had promises of assistance." But his success precluded all competition. The twenty-four songs comprised in the first two numbers include some of his very best and much of his most popular work, and it is interesting to note that almost the whole of them must have been written in Ireland. His stay at Donington lasted till June, and during the earlier part of it he was certainly engaged on poetry. But except for an excursion to Tunbridge, to visit Lady Donegal and her sister, he went nowhere else in England, and he was back in Dublin by the end of August. In the remaining months of that summer he paid the visit to the Vale of Ovoca which gave occasion to his lyric, "The Meeting of the Waters." A footnote to the first edition of the first number explains that—

"'The Meeting of the Waters' forms a part of that beautiful scenery which lies between Rathdrum and Arklow in the County of Wicklow, and these lines were suggested to me by a visit to this romantic spot in the summer of the present year (1807)."

It appears also, from a letter to Miss Godfrey, that in May 1807 his solitude at Donington was interrupted by the advent of a large house-party, and one may fairly say that, except for what he may have done in the space of about three months, the whole of the lyrics of the first two numbers were composed in the country where the airs themselves had their origin.

Moreover, during his stay at Donington, other work than the Melodies engaged him. He tells Lady Donegal, "to God's pleasure and both our comforts," that he is not writing love verses.

"I begin at last to find out that politics is the only thing minded in this country, and that it is better even to rebel against government than to have nothing to do with it; so I am writing politics."

The result of this determination was seen in the publication which appeared towards the end of 1808—Corruption and Intolerance, two more satirical essays in the Popian manner. These productions were issued by Carpenter in a thin octavo, eked out with a vast deal of notes. Moore had not yet arrived at his characteristic manner of expression in satire, and neither poem deserves much notice. Yet there was talent and to spare in lines like these:—

"Hence the rich oil, that from the Treasury steals,
Drips smooth o'er all the Constitution's wheels,
Giving the old machine such pliant play,
That Court and Commons jog one joltless way,
While Wisdom trembles for the crazy car,
So gilt, so rotten, carrying fools so far."

And at the close of the poem there is a note of unaccustomed fierceness in the reference to Castlereagh:

"See yon smooth lord, whom nature's plastic pains
Would seem to've fashion'd for those Eastern reigns
When eunuchs flourish'd, and such nerveless things
As men rejected were the chosen of Kings."

The lines on Intolerance were described as fragmentary—"the imperfect beginning of a long series of Essays upon the same important subject"; and the political attitude of the whole was sufficiently described on the title-page, where the lines were described as "Addressed to an Englishman by an Irishman."

Moore disclaimed in the preface any attachment to either English party, and the publication was, at least formally, anonymous. Yet we find him admitting that he had projected a journey to London to arrange for the republication of these poems, reinforced by others in the same kind, "in the hope that I might catch the eye of some of our patriotic politicians, and thus be enabled to serve both myself and the principles which I cherish." Carpenter, however, threw cold water on the scheme, and the rebuff touched the poet's susceptibilities so sharply, that he determined not to trust himself again in London "without the means of commanding a supply." For this, his past successes were no resource, since it was always Moore's imprudent habit to sell work outright. Little's Poems were being constantly reprinted, with no benefit to their author; and as for the songs, he writes in August 1808, "I quite threw away the Melodies. They will make that little, smooth fellow's fortune."

In 1809 another thin octavo, called The Sceptic, and signed by "The Author of Corruption and Intolerance," was issued by Carpenter: Rogers (who from this period onward ranks high among Moore's advisers) protesting against his continuance with this publisher. But the book attracted little notice; and the lack of success which attended these attempts in serious satire very naturally turned Moore back into the work where his triumph had been most gratifying. In January 1810 he published, with a dedication to Lady Donegal, the third instalment of his Irish Melodies, and it bears the stamp of its birthplace. The political passion is by far more openly declared than before, and in two or three of the lyrics—notably "After the Battle" and "The Irish Peasant to his Mistress"—it attains as high a pitch of poetry as is reached anywhere in its author's work. Part of the former may be quoted, if only to show the similarity between its motive and the central idea of "The Fire Worshippers."

"Night closed around the conqueror's way,
And lightnings showed the distant hill,
Where those who lost that dreadful day
Stood few and faint, but fearless still!
The soldier's hope, the patriot's zeal,
For ever dimmed, for ever crossed—
Oh! who shall say what heroes feel,
When all but life and honour's lost?
"The last sad hour of freedom's dream,
And valour's task, moved slowly by,
While mute they watched till morning's beam
Should rise and give them light to die."

The twelve lyrics of this number, together with the thin brochure of The Sceptic, are all that Moore had to show for the months from July or August 1808 to December 1810, which make up the only long continuous period of his adult life spent in Ireland. We have little record of his doings during that time, and the most significant part of it is to be found in a little quarto, privately printed, which details the performances of the Kilkenny Theatre. Published in 1825, this little book was made the subject by Moore of an article in the Edinburgh Review for October 1827. Its preface sketches briefly the history of a craze for private theatricals which pervaded Ireland in the years from 1760 onwards. But nowhere else does the passion appear to have established itself so strongly as on the banks of the Nore, where a company was got together in 1802 under the auspices of a local gentleman, Mr. Richard Power. Originally the performances lasted for a week, but soon the programme was arranged for a fortnight, and in one case for three weeks. The event was annual till 1819, when the Kilkenny Theatre was closed for ever—marking, as Moore says in his review, the end of the social period in Ireland.

Moore, as we have seen, returned to Ireland in August 1808, and on the 10th of October following he made his début at Kilkenny; not alone, for Mr. Power in that year obtained two notable recruits. Isaac Corry, one of Moore's most lasting and agreeable friends, joined the troupe, and remained faithful for years; moreover, the genial Joe Atkinson, who, we may guess, introduced these new actors, wrote the prologue. Moore was only at this time a tentative member of the company, and played three days out of the twelve. We find the Leinster Journal (whose exceedingly well-written notices of the performances are regularly quoted in the volume) noting, to begin with, that "the Theatrical Company have been favoured with the presence of Anacreon Moore." But on the 22nd October the new recruit made his first appearance in the small part of David in The Rivals, and "kept the audience in a roar by his Yorkshire dialect and rustic simplicity." The success was renewed by him as Mungo in The Padlock, and as Spado (a singing part) in A Castle of Andalusia. Next year a list of plays that ran from the 2nd to the 21st of October was produced, and we read that "the delight and darling of the Kilkenny audience appears to be Anacreon Moore," who wrote the prologue for the occasion, and "spoke it in his own bewitching manner." "The vivacity and naïveté of his manner, the ease and archness of his humour, and the natural sweetness of his voice have quite enamoured us." In the solid Shaksperian part of the programme—for Mr. Power and his men did not shrink before Macbeth and Othello—this actor took no part. What he did play in was the farce Peeping Tom of Coventry—and, let it be carefully observed, the Lady Godiva was Miss E. Dyke. Miss E. Dyke was a beautiful girl, then aged fourteen; her sister, Miss H. Dyke, had appeared the year before, and both, it seems, were professional actresses. Of their talents the recorder in the Leinster Journal makes no mention, but he is eloquent again and again on the successes of Mr. Moore, and the performances of 1809 appear to have marked an epoch. In 1810 Moore was again (and for the last time) a performer. The critic inclines to cavil at the slightness of the part given to this favourite, and emphasises Moore's cleverness with enthusiasm. But, indeed, on two of the evenings Moore had the stage entirely to himself, when, between the plays, he sat down to a piano and spoke his Melologue upon National Music, verses which he had written to be declaimed by Miss Smith at the Dublin Theatre for a benefit night, and which were afterwards published in pamphlet form.

All this pleasant gaiety had two consequences, of which the less important may be first noted. In January 1809, three months after Moore's first appearance at Kilkenny, Rogers writes: "I am delighted with your intention to make your debut on the stage—as an author I mean. Of your fame as an actor, I have had many reverberations." Nothing more came of the intention at the moment, but in December 1810 Moore returned to London after a two years' absence, and writes of many visits "from booksellers, musicsellers, managers, etc., with offers for books, songs, and plays. I rather think," he adds, "I may give something to Covent Garden." The result was that sometime in the following summer he was trembling upon a manager's verdict, and on September 4th, 1811, saw with no pleasurable feelings, the production of his opera, M.P. or The Blue Stocking, at the English Opera House. The piece was a failure, despite a friendly press; and the songs from it, all that Moore cared to preserve, are by no means good examples of his work. For many years afterwards the stage tempted him, as a means of earning money, but he never returned to the charge.

The other sequel of the Kilkenny theatricals was of very different character. In the end of 1808 Rogers, answering a letter, remarks, "Your sketch of Ireland is most gloomy." Twelve months later, and after Miss E. Dyke's first appearance in Mr. Power's company, Rogers writes, "I am rejoiced to think you are happy, which indeed you cannot fail to be while you are making others so; but don't let the Graces supplant the Muses." It is hardly rash to infer that Moore had written a cheerful account of the 1809 festival at Kilkenny. October 1810 saw the last appearance in the Kilkenny bills of Mr. Moore and Miss E. Dyke. Early in December Moore ran back to London to interview "booksellers, musicsellers, managers, etc." In January he returned to Dublin for a few weeks. February saw him in town again; and in March it appears that he has "at last got a little bedroom about two miles from town where I shall try now and then for a morning's work." On March 25th he was married to Miss Dyke at St. Martin's Church; but the marriage was kept a secret from his parents till the month of May following.

On the face of it, nothing could have seemed less promising than this alliance. Moore had to live by his wits; he was now in his thirty-second year, he had lived with people of expensive habits and, in a sense, lived fast. Allowing for some rhetoric, one may take as a fair account the description of his feelings which he wrote to Lady Donegal in the summer preceding the last bout of theatricals at Kilkenny—when, presumably, his fate was settled.

"I wish," he says, "I could give you even a tolerable account of what I have done; but I don't know how it is, both my mind and heart appear to have lain for some time completely fallow, and even the usual crop of wild oats has not been forthcoming. What is the reason of this? I believe there is in every man's life (at least in every man who has lived as if he knew how to live) one blank interval, which takes place at that period when the gay desires of youth are just gone off, and he has not yet made up his mind as to the feelings or pursuits that succeed them—when the last blossom has fallen away, and yet the fruit continues to look harsh and unpromising—a kind of interregnum which takes place upon the demise of love, before ambition and worldliness have seated themselves upon the vacant throne."

One can easily imagine a gentleman who writes in this strain making, some few months later, a match with a penniless and beautiful girl of sixteen, whose situation had so little to recommend it that he kept the whole affair dark even from his parents. It would not have been so likely a guess that he would make her the most affectionate of husbands, or that she would turn out to be the most helpful of wives. There are few things more significant in a man's history than his choice of a consort, and stress must be laid on this marriage. In the first place, it should be remarked that Moore, with an equipment for the business which might have made any fortune-hunter envious, never showed the least inclination to marry for money. Secondly, although himself among the most brilliant of talkers, finding his chief enjoyment in such talk as was heard, for instance, at Holland House, he married a girl who probably had little education and certainly possessed only the intelligence of the heart. He married, doubtless, for beauty; but probably not without discerning that this girl of sixteen had qualities of prudence, order, and courage which amply justified his choice. She must have possessed also a great charm, for the most difficult to please among Moore's friends were immediately subjugated. Rogers, who had a sincere and lifelong affection for the young poet, took her from the first into his good graces, and his letters all contain some pleasant word of remembrance to Psyche, as he christened her. In a later day, Psyche and her babies were the guests of that rigidly celibate old bachelor, and did not lack invitation to return. Miss Godfrey, another shrewd and loyal well-wisher, wrote six months after the marriage:—

"Be very sure, my dear Moore, that if you have got an amiable, sensible wife, extremely attached to you, as I am certain you have, it is only in the long run of life that you can know the full value of the treasure you possess. If you did but see, as I see with bitter regret in a very near connection of my own, the miserable effects of marrying a vain fool devoted to fashion, you would bless your stars night and day for your good fortune, and, to say the truth, you were as likely a gentleman to get into a scrape that way as any that I know. You were always the slave of beauty, say what you please; it covered a multitude of sins in your eyes, and I never can cease wondering at your good luck after all is said and done."

Certainly, Bessy Moore was as little of the "vain fool devoted to fashion" as could be found. The two lived together, in Bury Street, for a year, till after the birth of their first child,—Barbara—born in February 1812. Soon after this, a parliamentary crisis raised Moore's hopes of Lord Moira's advancement, and his own depending on it, to fever height. They were soon dashed. Lord Moira was a staunch supporter of the Catholic claims, and the ministry had decided to do nothing for the Catholics. For the moment at least Moore took the defeat as final and wrote with some bitterness to Lady Donegal:—

"In Lord Moira's exclusion from all chances of power, I see an end to the long hope of my life; and my intention is to go far away into the country, there to devote the remainder of my life to the dear circle I am forming around me, to the quiet pursuit of literature, and, I hope, of goodness."

Whatever spleen is to be traced in this letter soon vanished. On March 6, a letter to Miss Godfrey marks Moore's definitive breaking with his old habit of precarious reliance upon the prospect of patronage. Literary earnings, which he had hitherto regarded as a mere temporary means of meeting embarrassments, were now to become the sole support of himself and his family; and he bids good-bye with a cheerful courage to "all the hope and suspense in which the prospect of Lord Moira's advancement" had kept him for so many years.

"It has been a sort of Will o' the Wisp to me all my life, and the only thing I regret is, that it was not extinguished sooner, for it has led me a sad dance."

Retirement from town was necessary, for the general curiosity "to see Moore's wife" threatened to become ruinous; and one may be very sure that if Bessy refused invitations "to the three most splendid assemblies in town," it was her doing and not her husband's. In the choice of a neighbourhood, access to a library had to be considered, and Moore naturally enough looked for a home near Donington Park. It was accordingly at Kegworth, a few miles from Lord Moira's seat, that he installed himself; but the proximity was unfortunate, for the cabinet crisis continued, and the Prince Regent's personal reliance on Lord Moira sustained Moore's hopes. In the autumn came news that Moira was to be Governor-General of India, and Moore's friends immediately settled it that the poet would accompany him as secretary. The remaining months of 1812 were embittered by hope deferred, which some expressions let fall by Lord Moira helped to quicken. But the great man and his household came and went, making it clear to Moore that he could count on nothing but continued good-will. The suggestion of an exchange of patronage made by Lord Moira was fortunately put aside; Moore replying that he would "rather struggle on as he was than take anything that would have the effect of tying up his tongue under such a system as the present."

Thus, in January 1813, with Moira's departure for India, the long relation between the patron and client ended, not without mutual embarrassment. Yet Moore was grateful for the kindly attentions heaped upon himself and his Bessy, who was then in a state to need them. Her second confinement, again of a daughter, Olivia, took place in March; and, as soon as she could be moved, Moore and she accepted willingly the invitation of a cordial friend, one Mrs. Ready, and settled into her house, Oakhanger Hall, for the summer. It had been decided to give up the Kegworth cottage, and look out for some pleasanter home; and a plan had also been arranged which made Moore glad to leave his wife in friendly company during the months of the London season.

In 1811, a fourth number of the Irish Melodies had been published, and Moore's cumulative success as a song-writer had tempted the brothers Power to make an offer which ensured to him and his at least a livelihood for the term of the agreement. They were to pay £500 a year for the monopoly of Moore's musical compositions.[1] The arrangement thus entered into lasted for over twenty years, and was financially Moore's backbone. But both Moore himself and the Powers recognised that the vogue of these songs was largely due to Moore's own singing of them, and it was consequently settled at Kegworth, that the singer should go up to town alone for the month of May. Bessy was naturally reluctant at first; "indeed," Moore wrote to Power, "it was only on my representing to her that my songs would all remain a dead letter with you, if I did not go up in the gay time of the year, and give them life by singing them about, that she agreed to my leaving her." The practice, once fixed, became habitual. For the next thirty years Moore was never long enough absent from town to lose touch with the society which never ceased to welcome him; while Bessy remained at home, minding the babies and keeping down the bills. Few women, even without her beauty, would have consented to the situation; but she accepted it cheerfully, and regretted only the absences of her husband. She had her reward. Lord John Russell writes in his introduction, concerning Moore's regard for his wife:—

"From 1811, the year of his marriage, to 1852, that of his death, this excellent and beautiful person received from him the homage of a lover enhanced by all the gratitude, all the confidence, which the daily and hourly happiness he enjoyed were sure to inspire. Thus, whatever amusement he might find in society, whatever literary resources he might seek elsewhere, he always returned to his home with a fresh feeling of delight. The time he had been absent had been a time of exertion and exile; his return restored him to tranquillity and to peace. Keen as was his natural sense of enjoyment, he never balanced between pleasure and happiness. His letters and his journal bear abundant trace of these natural and deep-seated affections."

It is, indeed, true that few men of whom one reads appear to have got more pleasure out of their home than Moore, and the first home where he really settled down to quiet domesticity was at Mayfield Cottage, "near the pretty town of Ashbourne," "a little nutshell of a thing, yet with a room to spare for a friend." The early letters abound in descriptive touches, one of which shows Bessy busy superintending workmen, while the head of the family and his little Barbara rolled in the hay outside. The neighbourhood, too, was full of welcome and small gaieties. Bessy appeared at a local ball and excited a great sensation by her beauty.

"She wore a turban that night to please me, and she looks better in it than anything else; for it strikes almost everybody that sees her, how like the form and expression of her face are to Catalani's, and a turban is the thing for that sort of character."

It is as well to remember that this prudent little dame was then aged eighteen—in spite of her two babies; and Moore, though getting up in years by comparison, was youthful enough in spirits.

"You would have laughed to see Bessy and me going to dinner," he writes to his mother. "We found in the middle of our walk, that we were near half an hour too early, so we set to practising country dances in the middle of a retired green lane, till the time was expired."

[1] From this, however, deduction was made for part of the payments to Sir John Stevenson, and afterwards to Henry Bishop. Moore's method (if it could be called a method) was to draw on Power for what he wanted; and these deductions amounted to much more than he supposed. The natural result was a quarrel when in the long run accounts were made up.

CHAPTER III

LALLA ROOKH

There was scarcely a period in Moore's life when prospects looked brighter for him than just after his settlement at Mayfield Cottage. He had clearly decided on living in seclusion till he should have finished the important work on which he had been engaged already, off and on, during a full year. In the summer of 1812, enough of Lalla Rookh existed to be shown to Rogers, when he and Moore took a tour together through the Peak country; and Rogers's criticism left the poet rather out of conceit with his work. Next year found him again dispirited, for the Giaour had appeared, and Moore writes:—

"Never was anything more unlucky for me than Byron's invasion of this region, which, when I entered it, was yet untrodden, and whose chief charm consisted in the gloss and novelty of its features; but it will now be overrun with clumsy adventurers, and, when I make my appearance, instead of being a leader, as I looked to be, I must dwindle into a humble follower—a Byronian. This is disheartening, and I sometimes doubt whether I shall publish it at all; though at the same time, if I may trust my own judgment, I never wrote so well before."

Things went from bad to worse. On August 28, 1813, Byron wrote to him, "Stick to the East;—the oracle, Staël, told me it was the only poetical policy." But the letter went on to announce Byron's project of a story grafted on to the amours of a Peri and a mortal. Now, Moore had already in his long-delayed work made the daughter of a Peri the heroine of one of his tales, and spent much pains in "detailing the love adventures of her aerial parent in an episode." He wrote at once, asking only for fair warning, and Byron immediately disclaimed all commerce with Peris; but, having done so, set to work upon the Bride of Abydos. It is easy to judge of Moore's feelings when he read the new poem and found that Byron had again, by pure accident, anticipated his friend. One of the stories intended for insertion in Lalla Rookh had been carried some way, but it contained, says Moore, such singular coincidences with the Bride, "not only in locality and costume, but in plot and characters," that there was nothing for it but to give up.

The whole thing was pure and simple bad luck, and Byron's very sincere correspondence is mainly directed to chiding his friend for the "strange diffidence of your own powers which I cannot account for." But the blow was heavy.

There is no doubt as to Moore's priority of idea. On September 11th, 1811, we find him writing to Miss Godfrey, after the failure of his operetta, M.P.: "I shall now take to my poem and do something, I hope, that will place me above the vulgar herd both of worldlings and critics; but you shall hear from me again when I get among the maids of Cashmere, the sparkling springs of Rochabad, and the fragrant banquets of the Peris." And Rogers, in the same month, refers to the projected epic: "Are you now in a pavilion on the banks of the Tigris?" But Moore, for all his apparent facility, was a slow and fastidious writer, and it seems that, even in 1813, not a great deal was accomplished.

He was, however, resolute that nothing should divert him from his task, and the proposal made by Murray through Byron, to establish him as "editor of a review like the Edinburgh and the Quarterly," was set aside; as was also the suggestion from Power for an opera, which would bring in money both from theatre and bookshops. His determination was the more remarkable, because already his account with Power was forestalled. So long as he could earn money, Moore refused persistently to be indebted to any man (except Rogers, and that only in two instances) for a loan; but with equal regularity he anticipated by long periods all his earnings from publishers. His house-moving had involved him in unlooked-for expenses, and, to meet these, he had exhausted the supply from a first success in one of the two branches of literature which he was to make peculiarly his own.

In March 1813 was published for Carpenter (through an understrapper in the Row) Intercepted Letters; or the Twopenny Postbag. The preface explained that the letters in question came from a bag dropped by a Twopenny Postman, which had been picked up by an agent of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, but abandoned, when it became clear that the discoveries of profligacy which it indicated lay too high up to be handled. The letters—eight in all—were attributed to correspondents whose names were transparently disguised by initials, and who for the most part belonged to the Prince Regent's circle. A supplementary group of epigrams and occasional verses, reprinted from the Morning Chronicle, eked out the thin volume. Thin as it was, it sold for a high price, and it sold prodigiously; a year later Moore wrote a preface for the fourteenth edition, which Carpenter now openly adopted. Moore, however, did not write in his own name. The nominal author of the preface, as of the book, was "Thomas Brown the younger." But the authorship was never for a moment in doubt, as many of the squibs reprinted had been correctly assigned on their first appearance in the Chronicle; and Moore showed his certitude that the disguise would be only formal by inserting, in the dedication to Woolriche, an assurance that "doggerel is not my only occupation." The preface to the later edition contains some biographical matter of interest. It begins by denying the rumour of collaboration or joint-authorship; and then passes to what was a virtual avowal of identity.

"To the charge of being an Irishman, poor Mr. Brown pleads guilty; and I believe it must also be acknowledged that he comes of a Roman Catholic family.... But from all this it does not necessarily follow that Mr. Brown is a Papist; and indeed I have the strongest reasons for suspecting that they who say so are somewhat mistaken.... All I profess to know of his orthodoxy is that he has a Protestant wife and two or three little Protestant children, and that he has been seen at church every Sunday, for a whole year together, listening to the sermons of his truly reverend and amiable friend, Dr. ——"[1]

Moore by no means conceived of tolerance only as a virtue to be practised by Protestants for the benefit of Catholics. Long before his marriage—indeed, when his Bessy was in very short frocks—he had written, as an exhortation to Protestants:—

"From the heretic girl of my soul shall I fly
To find somewhere else a more orthodox kiss?"

And later, from the Catholic side of the question, he practised his own doctrine conscientiously, when it came to falling in love, for Bessy Moore was a Protestant. In spite of the phrase "it does not necessarily follow that Mr. Brown is a Papist," there is no reason to suppose that Moore ever meditated a change of religion. Later in life, his sister Katherine did so, and he advised her to follow his example and remain quietly a Catholic. But he said openly to her, and records it in his diary: "My having married a Protestant wife gave me an opportunity of choosing a religion at least for my children, and if my marriage had no other advantage, I should think this quite sufficient to be grateful for."

But while in these respects he showed himself a Catholic of the least rigid order, he was, naturally, all the keener in his hostility to Protestant bigotry. And, having discarded the sonorous denunciation of Corruption and Intolerance in heavy Popian couplets, he now, as Mr. Thomas Brown the younger, attacked Addington, Eldon, Castlereagh and the rest, in a spirited light gallop of verse. The occasion of the opening epistle was afforded by a present of ponies which Lady Barbara Ashley had given to the Princess Charlotte of Wales. Lady Barbara being a Catholic, keen noses smelt Popery in the gift; and the letter attributed to "the Pr——ss Ch——e of W—-s," recounts a supposed Cabinet Council, at which the crisis is discussed. A few lines may serve as an example of this clever jeu d'esprit.

"'If the Pr-nc-ss will keep them,' says Lord
C-stl-r—gh,
'To make them quite harmless, the only true way
Is (as certain Chief Justices do with their wives)
To flog them within half an inch of their lives;
If they've any bad Irish Mood lurking about,
This (he knew by experience) would soon draw it out.'
Or—if this be thought cruel—his Lordship proposes
'The new Veto snaffle to hind down their noses—
A pretty contrivance, made out of old chains,
Which appears to indulge, while it doubly restrains;
Which, however high-mettled, their gamesomeness checks,'
Adds his Lordship, humanely, 'or else breaks their necks!'"

The bulk of the satire was, however, social rather than political, and largely aimed at the Prince Regent—from whom Moore and all his friends were now completely estranged. In the second Letter, some capital lines describe—

"That awful hour or two
Of grave tonsorial preparation,
Which, to a fond, admiring nation,
Sends forth, announced by trump and drum,
The best-wigg'd P——e in Christendom!"

Even better work was to be found in the reprints than in the Letters. The "Anacreontic to a Plumassier" is a very delicate piece of verse, fluffy and feathery. Almost as good was the version, or perversion, of Horace II. 11, "freely translated by the Pr—ce R-g—t":—

"Brisk let us revel, while revel we may;
For the gay bloom of fifty soon passes away,
And then people get fat
And infirm and all that,
And a wig (I confess it) so clumsily sits
That it frightens the little loves out of their wits."

Taking them as a whole, it would be hard to find better examples of light-hearted satire. Moore had little of the soeva indignatio; his touch was on the ridiculous rather than the disgusting; and even the Prince of Wales could take fun out of the chaff directed against his fat pretensions to comeliness. Probably no one was much the worse, or the better, for Moore's satire, and it abounds so in topical allusion, of the most ephemeral kind, that to-day the interest has evaporated. But the reader can easily understand its immediate popularity, and it is distressing to think that Carpenter should have reaped the lion's share of the profit. From this onward Moore very wisely sought another publisher.

His residence at Ashbourne lasted till March 1817, and the years spent there were the most fertile of his existence. The period was terminated by a move to the neighbourhood of London to supervise the publication of Lalla Rookh, and virtually the whole of this poem may be said to have been composed in Mayfield Cottage. In the same period, Moore produced the sixth number of the Irish Melodies and the first number of his Sacred Songs, which rank next in importance to the Melodies among his poetical works. If he had never written a line after 1817, his reputation as a poet would stand no less high than it does at present.

The volume of the Melodies which Power issued in 1815 contains several poems which throw an interesting light on the poet's state of feeling towards politics, and especially towards his own country. One of the most successful songs in the number (as indeed it deserved to be) was the lyric in which the reproach of Catholic Ireland to the Prince who had gone back on his early protestations is put as the complaint of a forsaken woman:—

"When first I met thee, warm and young,
There shone such truth about thee,
And on thy lip such promise hung,
I did not dare to doubt thee.
I saw thee change, yet still relied,
Still clung with hope the fonder,
And thought, though false to all beside,
From me thou couldst not wander.
But go, deceiver! go,—
The heart, whose hopes could make it
Trust one so false, so low,
Deserves that thou shouldst break it."

And the closing refrain has a real energy:—

"Go—go—'tis vain to curse,
'Tis weakness to upbraid thee;
Hate cannot wish thee worse
Than guilt and shame have made thee."

Moore wrote to Power in the early part of 1815, after a visit to Chatsworth, where he had spent his days in a whirl of fine company:—

"You cannot imagine what a sensation the Prince's song created. It was in vain to guard your property; they had it sung and repeated over so often that they all took copies of it, and I dare say in the course of next week there will not be a Whig lord or lady in England who will not be in possession of it."

The other notable number is the poem to the tune Savourneen Deelish, which begins:—

"'Tis gone, and for ever, the light we saw breaking,
Like Heaven's first dawn o'er the sleep of the dead—
When Man, from the slumber of ages awaking,
Look'd upward, and bless'd the pure ray, ere it fled.
'Tis gone, and the gleams it has left of its burning
But deepen the long night of bondage and mourning,
That dark o'er the kingdoms of earth is returning,
And darkest of all, hapless Erin, o'er thee."

Moore wrote this after Napoleon had been sequestered in Elba, when the Holy Alliance were left masters of the field. He was well pleased with the verses, and his comment to Power is extremely typical of his attitude at this period:—"It is bold enough; but the strong blow I have aimed at the French in the last stanza makes up for everything." The lines referred to are these:—

"But shame on those tyrants who envied the blessing!
And shame on the light race unworthy its good,
Who, at Death's reeking altar, like furies caressing
The young hope of Freedom, baptized it in blood!"

The same desire to conciliate English public opinion is shown by another song which represents Erin as drying her tears:—

"When after whole pages of sorrow and shame
She saw History write,
With a pencil of light
That illumed the whole volume, her Wellington's name."

In one of the prefaces which Moore wrote, with ebbing faculties, for the collected edition of his works, readers will find him claiming for this lyric the spirit of prophecy, because Wellington ultimately "recommended to the throne the great measure of Catholic Emancipation." If indeed at last the Duke heeded the singer's closing injunction—

"Go, plead for the land that first cradled thy fame,"

it was with no good-will: and there is far more sincerity in Moore's note somewhere in the journals that his song had been wholly wasted on the recipient of the homage. Still, there is no good ground for bringing against the poet a reproach of time-serving. His state of mind, if one endeavours to realise it, must have been strangely complicated. In the victories of Wellington, so largely won by the bravery of Irish soldiers, he felt, no doubt, as did most Irishmen, a kind of proprietary gratification; but the dethronement of Napoleon caused him no unmixed joy. Like Byron, and many another man of that day, he had a fascinated admiration for this prodigious master of legions; and moreover, Napoleon's ruin meant the establishment of the Holy Alliance, and, as one of many corollaries, the perpetuation of helotry in Ireland. Ireland had reason to bless the movement towards liberty which came from France, and not less to execrate the excesses which strengthened the hands of liberty's opponents. There is nothing in the poem that requires defence; what requires either apology or condemnation is Moore's attempt to flavour with abuse of England's detested opponent an expression of his own convictions—involving, as they did, a condemnation of English rule.

The truth is that the business of adapting Irish nationalist sentiment to the taste of English drawing-rooms was perilous to sincerity; and, in this period of his life, Moore was steadily losing touch with Ireland. The number of the Melodies under discussion closed with the beautiful lyric in which the singer bade farewell to this way of poetry:—

"Dear Harp of my Country! farewell to thy numbers,
This sweet wreath of song is the last we shall twine."

The farewell, as it proved, was only temporary, but it indicates that Moore felt the inspiration failing him; and, as a matter of fact, the four later numbers of the Melodies are by far inferior to their predecessors. Their inferiority, however, was due to no lack of sympathy; it indicates only that the artist's instinct was right, and that Moore's thought about Ireland, in later days, took naturally other forms of expression.

But in 1815 he had been absent from his country for four long years, during which his life had been engrossed with other things; and the Catholic cause, which had always been foremost in his mind, was now losing its attraction, for two reasons, sufficiently indicated in his correspondence with Lady Donegal.

In the spring of 1815, his third child, a little girl, aged only a few months, died at Mayfield; and, in hopes to soothe the mother by change of scene, Moore decided to hasten on a long-projected visit to Ireland. Lady Donegal wrote that she heard this with regret, "for it is not a safe residence for you in any way"; and she pressed on him warnings against the "Irish democrats." Moore replied, certainly with sufficient emphasis:—

"If there is anything in the world that I have been detesting and despising more than another for this long time past, it has been those very Dublin politicians whom you so fear I should associate with. I do not think a good cause was ever ruined by a more bigoted, brawling, and disgusting set of demagogues; and, though it be the religion of my fathers, I must say that much of this vile, vulgar spirit is to be traced to that wretched faith, which is again polluting Europe with Jesuitism and Inquisitions, and which of all the humbugs that have stultified mankind is the most narrow-minded and mischievous; so much for the danger of my joining Messrs. O'Connel, O'Donnel, etc."

That was written in March, after the escape from Elba. A month after Waterloo, Moore put sharply enough, to the same correspondent, his detestation for the Bourbons, and his general dissent from Lady Donegal's Toryism. But, although written from Ireland, the letter expresses the sentiments rather of an English Whig than an Irish Nationalist:—

"Reprobate as I am, I am sure you will give credit to my prudence and good taste in declining the grand public dinner that was about to be given me upon my arrival in Dublin. I found there were, too many of your favourites, the Catholic orators, at the bottom of the design—that the fountain of honour was too much of a holywater fount for me to dabble in it with either safety or pleasure; and though I should have liked mightily the opportunity of making a treasonable speech or two after dinner, I thought the wisest thing I could do was to decline the honour. Being thus disappointed in me, they have given a grand public dinner to an eminent toll-gatherer, whose patriotic and elegant method of collecting the tolls entitles him, I have no doubt, to the glory of such a celebration. Alas! alas! it must be confessed that our poor country altogether is a most wretched concern; and as for the Catholics (as I have just said in a letter written within these five minutes), one would heartily wish them all in their own Purgatory, if it were not for their adversaries, whom one wishes still further."

Following that is a letter to Rogers, in which Moore writes of a visit to the "foggy, boggy regions of Tipperary."

"The only thing," he goes on, "I could match you[2] in, is banditti; and if you can imagine groups of ragged Shanavests (as they are called) going about in noonday, armed and painted over like Catabaw Indians, to murder tithe-proctors, land-valuers, etc., you have the most stimulant specimen of the sublime that Tipperary affords. The country, indeed, is in a frightful state, and rational remedies have been delayed so long that nothing but the sword will answer now."

Very similar views would have been expressed by any member of the Whig aristocracy, whose detestation of the Holy Alliance would certainly have extended itself to the Holy Water fount, and who would have shared Moore's fastidious dislike of O'Connell's method of raising party funds. It must, however, be remembered that these passages represent Moore's immature opinions; and against the description of the Shanavests as murderous savages must be set the Memoirs of Captain Rock, which give the natural history of agrarian crime, denouncing, not the Shanavests or Whiteboys, but the circumstances which bred such crime, as naturally and as regularly as filth breeds fever. For Moore wrote Captain Rock after reading Irish history and making something of an exhaustive tour through the south of Ireland, while in 1815 his sense of Irish grievances was largely theoretical. "I love Ireland," he wrote to his friend Corry, "but I hate Dublin"; and it is not very cynical to say that when he wrote this, Dublin was all he knew of Ireland. The influence of his early association with Emmet and others, renewed periodically by his visits to his home, was mainly an affair of sentiment, and spent itself during his long sojourn away from contact with Irish minds. It revived in him later, and it was nourished, by reading Irish history, into a steady conviction. But the first impulse that revived in Moore the enthusiasm for his own country was, I think, gratitude for its recognition of his services; and one may not unfairly trace something of his temporary alienation, if not from Ireland, at least from Irish Nationalists, to his feeling that his merits were not adequately valued among his own people. When he is blaspheming against the "low, illiberal, puddle-headed, and gross-hearted herd of Dublin," it is because his Melologue "never drew a soul to the theatres in Dublin."

In England, during these years, his reputation was at its height. Byron in 1814 dedicated The Corsair to "the poet of all circles and the idol of his own." Leigh Hunt the same year admitted, in his "Feast of the Poets," only four to dine with Apollo, and Moore, with Scott, Southey, Campbell, made the company. Stray pieces, such as the lines on Sheridan's death—Moore's finest piece of satire—caught like wildfire; and the Edinburgh, in reviewing the sixth number of Irish Melodies, made ample amends for its earlier onslaught. More than that, Jeffrey approached Moore, in the most honorific manner, through Rogers, to enlist him as a contributor, and a contributor Moore accordingly became.

His first article, a review of Lord Thurlow's poems, was simply a light piece of amusing criticism; but his second choice of subject astonished Jeffrey. Taking for a peg Boyd's translation of Select Passages from the patristic writings, Moore proceeded to hang upon it his views of the Fathers and their works generally. These views are perhaps a little remarkable as coming from a Catholic, and the tone of the article may be fairly inferred from a passage:—

"At a time when the Inquisition is re-established by our 'beloved Ferdinand'; when the Pope again brandishes the keys of St. Peter with an air worthy of the successor of the Hildebrands and Perettis; when canonisation is about to be inflicted on another Louis, and little silver models of embryo princes are gravely vowed at the shrine of the Virgin;—in times like these, it is not too much to expect that such enlightened authors as St. Jerome and Tertullian may become the classics of most of the Continental Courts."

Nevertheless, even those who respect the Fathers most, will hardly deny the wit of Moore's comment: indeed, few things enable us so well to guess at the nature of his admitted brilliancy in conversation as these early articles, coming from his unjaded pen. Another quotation may be given:—

"St. Justin, the Martyr, is usually considered as the well-spring of most of those strange errors which flowed so abundantly through the early ages of the Church, and spread around them in their course with such luxuriance of absurdity. The most amiable, and therefore the least contagious, of his heterodoxies was that which led him to patronise the souls of Socrates and other Pagans, in consideration of those glimmerings of the divine Logos which his fancy discovered through the dark night of Heathenism. The absurd part of this opinion remained, while the tolerant spirit evaporated. And while these Pagans were allowed to have known something of the Trinity, they were yet damned for not knowing more, with most unrelenting orthodoxy."

In any case, most readers will be of the same mind as Jeffrey, who wrote that he "was far from suspecting" Moore's "familiarity with these recondite subjects." But it must be remembered that Moore was always a bookish man, a poet who derived his inspiration largely from out-of-the-way literature—and this article contains references in which we see the germinal ideas of his Loves of the Angels. I have noted a touch of pedantry, oddly associated with exuberant youth, in his version of Anacreon; and something of the same combination is to be found in the magnum opus which, for a while at all events, set the seal upon his fame.

Nothing could more practically show Moore's position in the literary world of his day than the negotiations for the copyright of Lalla Rookh. In 1814 Murray offered two thousand guineas for it, but Moore's friends thought he should have more, and, going to Longman, they claimed that Mr. Moore should receive no less than the highest price ever paid for a poem. "That," said Longman, "was three thousand pounds paid for Rokeby." On this basis they treated, and Longman was inclined to stipulate for a preliminary perusal. Moore, however, refused, and the agreement was finally worded:—"That upon your giving into our hands a poem of the length of Rokeby you shall receive from us the sum of £3000." This was in December 1814. The poem was ready for publication in 1816, but that year (in the confusion after Waterloo) being very adverse to publishers, Moore generously offered the Longmans the chance to postpone or rescind their bargain; and postponed it accordingly was till May 1817.

It is worth noting that in the January of that year Moore writes to ask Power if he can "muster me up a few pounds (five or six), as I am almost without a shilling." A heavy blow had also fallen upon him, as the retrenchments then proceeding had occasioned John Moore's removal from the barrack-mastership in Dublin, with a consequent reduction of his income from £350 to £200. But the publication of Lalla Rookh set all right for the moment. A thousand pounds was drawn to discharge all Moore's liabilities; the other two thousand was to remain in the publishers' hands, and they undertook to pay Moore's father a hundred pounds a year as interest on it. Moore himself and his family moved up to a new house at Hornsey in Middlesex, much more expensive than his Derbyshire cottage; and here for two months he was busy with the proofs, and naturally anxious. By May 30th he was clear of all scruples as to the publisher's pockets, and with justice. A quarter of a century later Longman still looked on Lalla Rookh as "the cream of the copyrights."

One may take this moment for the height of Moore's prosperity. His success was emphasised by many flattering offers, one of which was to conduct a paper for the Opposition—a suggestion which Moore set aside, partly on the ground that he had lost his taste for living in London. In the middle of the first flourish of eulogy, Rogers, to whom Lalla had been dedicated, and who in June was housing Bessy and her young ones, carried off the poet for a trip to Paris. Moore wrote in raptures with the French capital; but that was the end of his good time.

Bad news recalled him: Barbara, the eldest little girl, was dangerously ill from the effects of a fall, and a month after his return she died. The loss fell heaviest on the mother, and it is noticeable that Moore was then the one to assume control. This seems natural enough, when one remembers that his wife was only three and twenty; but in later days, the relation was very different. The family moved for a while to Lady Donegal's house, 56 Davies Street, Berkeley Square, and thence Moore made an excursion to look for a new home. A great Whig peer, the Marquis of Lansdowne, had suggested that the poet's residence should be fixed near Bowood and its library; and three houses were offered for his inspection. Only one proved to be at all within the reach of his means, a little thatched cottage with a pretty garden. Bessy went down a week later, escorted by Power, to look at it, and returned delighted—very probably with its cheapness, for it was offered to them furnished at £40 a year. Under these rather sad circumstances, Moore and his wife moved into their definitive home. On November 19th, 1817, Moore wrote to Power from "Sloperton, Devizes," to say that they were in possession, and that he himself was just sallying out for his walk in the garden, with his head full of words for the Melodies.

It was always his habit to compose out of doors, and pilgrims to Sloperton are still shown a little gravelled path round the garden, which keeps the name of Poet's Walk. Such pilgrims can easily enough imagine the house as Moore first knew it. The thatched roof has been replaced by slates, probably when the addition was built on for Moore's accommodation. This addition consisted of two rooms, a good-sized sitting-room with windows opening on to the green lawn and garden, and over it a bedroom to match—the room in which Moore died, and which, according to tradition, his ghost still inhabits. This addition has an ordinary sloping roof, joined on to the original front, which consists of three gables. All about are great elms and chestnut trees, and the whole countryside is rich in the beauty that Moore delighted in—"sunniness and leanness," to quote his own happy phrase. The quiet little country town of Devizes is three miles off to the north, and in that direction Bromham, the hamlet which gives its name to the parish, nestles among trees across a small valley. A roughly paved lane, deep sunk between profuse hedges, leads from Sloperton to the lovely fifteenth-century church in whose grave-yard Moore lies with his wife and children, among generations of squires and yokels of a race not his own.

From this valley the ground rises gently, and the road from Devizes to Chippenham has to crest a hill or swelling ridge. Astride of the ridge is Lord Lansdowne's demesne, and from Moore's house to the nearest entry to the park, the distance must be something over a mile. Thence it is another mile's walking through glades and lawns to the great house—"dear Bowood," as Miss Edgeworth called it, famous in those days for its hospitality to men and women of letters. Altogether the neighbourhood was as pleasant as could be found, but at first Bessy Moore was uncomfortable in it. She wanted "some near and plain neighbours to make intimacy with and enjoy a little tea-drinking now and then." The Lansdownes had every wish to be kind, but they and their friends belonged to a set of which Moore had for years been a privileged member, and if Bessy entered it, she found herself, as Moore said, "a perfect stranger in the midst of people who are all intimate." She consoled herself however with works of charity, visiting the poor about her, and helping them with her clever fingers. In the meantime Moore was busy with another collection of light verse—The Fudge Family in Paris, for which his visit to Paris with Rogers had given the suggestion; and a seventh edition of Lalla Rookh was printing within less than a year after publication. Thus all omens seemed hopeful, when suddenly a bolt from the blue came down.

Moore's deputy in Bermuda had proved thoroughly untrustworthy, repeated letters having elicited no accounts from him for the last year of the war. It appeared now that he had embezzled the proceeds of a ship and cargo—representing a sum of £6000, which had been deposited with him, pending an appeal to the Court at home. Moore was fully liable, and his only hope lay in the conscience of a certain merchant, uncle of the defaulter, who had recommended his nephew to Moore, and might therefore feel bound in honour to make good the defalcation. Moore bore himself, however, cheerfully enough, though anticipating sequestration in a debtor's prison. The advice of business men in London reassured him somewhat, and the Fudges came out at the right moment with great éclat, bringing in £350 to the author within the first fortnight. Consolation of another kind was administered, when, in May of the same year (1818), the poet ran over to Dublin, and for a fortnight lived in a bustle of acclamation. A great public dinner was organised in his honour, and when he appeared in the theatre, he was called repeatedly during the performance to make his bow from the front of the box. All this, he said, "was scarcely more delightful to me on my own account than as a proof of the strong spirit of nationality of my countrymen."

Another great exultation helped to dispel the gloom of his Bermuda prospects, for in October Bessy became at last the mother of a son. Little comfort as this child proved to be in the long run, he was for years the apple of Moore's eye. The god-parents were, as usual, a strange and interesting assortment—Miss Godfrey, the shrewd and tried friend of so many years, Lord Lansdowne, and old Dr. Parr, the famous Grecian. This last was a recent acquaintance, sprung out of the work on which, during the year, Moore had been engaged—a new literary departure marking the incipient change in him from poet to man of letters.

His lines on the death of Sheridan showed plainly the hold which the one brilliant Irishman had on the other's imagination, and Murray suggested in 1817 that Moore should be Sheridan's biographer. By August 1818, Moore was at work, visiting Sheridan's sister, Mrs. Le Fanu, in Bath; and at her house he first met Dr. Parr, who warmed to the scholar in Moore. They talked together of Erasmus, the Wolfian theory of Homer, and such like things; hobnobbing generously the while.

Material in plenty for the Memoir was forthcoming, from a diversity of sources, but difficulties arose as to the share in the prospective profits claimed by the Sheridan family, and Moore occupied himself with other researches: reading Boxiana, visiting Jackson the pugilist, and studying other repositories of "flash" dialect, in order to fit himself for the task of writing his new squib Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, in which a professional boxer, Crib, was the spokesman. It appeared in the spring of 1819; the seventh number of Irish Melodies had been issued in the preceding year, so that it will appear that Moore's industry was constant. Work on the Sheridan continued briskly, as we find by entries in his diary, it having been settled that Murray was to be the publisher and to pay 1000 guineas for the book. In the meantime Moore was turning over subjects for another poetical opus magnum, and something in his omnivorous reading suggested a story drawn from ancient Egypt—a first hint of the material which he ultimately wrought into his prose romance, The Epicurean.

In the summer he made his usual visit to town, and Bessy with the children went off by boat to Edinburgh to visit her mother and sisters. The Dyke family appear to have dropped pretty completely out of Moore's existence, but occasional references show that they continued to keep in touch at least with Bessy, and to receive small sums. Moore's cause was now at last up for hearing, and his sanguine nature had led him to hope for a dismissal of it: but on July 10th the blow fell. He learnt that in two months an attachment would be put in force against his person, and therefore there was nothing left for it but to decide on a place of retreat. The Liberties of Holyrood were suggested, and Moore had all but decided on going there, when Lord John Russell—most unfortunately, as he came to think—urged the alternative of a visit to the Continent in his company, with a view to final settlement in Paris. The Longmans backed the suggestion by saying that a few poetical epistles from places of note would pay all expenses; and accordingly in the beginning of September 1819, Moore set off for Dover in Lord John's coach.

This break-up of so pleasant a home was distressing, and friends were eager to prevent the necessity. Promptest of them was Jeffrey, who, immediately the report of the calamity came, made excuse for writing a letter on business of the Edinburgh, and then went on:

"I cannot from my heart resist adding another word. I have heard of your misfortunes and of the noble way you bear them. Is it very impertinent to say that I have £500 entirely at four service, which you may repay when you please; and as much more, which I can advance upon any reasonable security of repayment in seven years?

"Perhaps it is very unpardonable in me to say this; but upon my honour, I would not make you the offer, if I did not feel that I would accept it without scruple from you."

Nothing could be more honourable to both men than such an offer, and Moore long afterwards referred to it in his Memoir with deep feeling. It was only one of a shoal of similar tributes. Leigh Hunt, then editor of the Examiner, wrote to Perry of the Chronicle to urge the opening of a public subscription. Rogers pressed £500 of his own on Moore, as a beginning towards some such fund: Lord Lansdowne offered security for the whole; Lord John Russell proposed to set aside all future profits from his Life of Lord Russell, just published, and forwarded inquiries from his brother Lord Tavistock as to whether anything was doing to save Moore from imprisonment. "I am very poor," Lord Tavistock wrote, "but I have always had such a strong admiration for Moore's independence of mind that I would willingly sacrifice something to be of use to him." Moore recorded all this with legitimate pride, in his diary, but continued steadfast in his determination to rely on no one but his publishers; and the Longmans expressed the fullest readiness to advance in the way of business any reasonable sum, to which he might, by compromise, reduce the claims on him.

Nothing could more strongly indicate the general respect in which Moore was held than this practical testimony. It is necessary to emphasise that Moore impressed those in contact with him by no quality so much as by his high-mindedness. Old Dr. Parr expressed the feeling of many, when he left by his will a ring to Thomas Moore, "who stands high in my estimation for original genius, for his exquisite sensibility, for his independent spirit and incorruptible integrity." Men who saw how Moore lived felt no doubt the greatness of the temptations to which he was exposed. Private liberality was pressed upon him repeatedly; and if his pride revolted from that, he had more than a common chance of public rewards. Those anxious to serve the poet were by no means only of one political colour; no man had more aptitude to conciliate, or stronger motives for doing so. Early in his married life, at a time when his professed patron, Lord Moira, took office under a government opposed to the Catholic cause, which he, like Moore, had always supported, the poet might easily have waived something of his scruples; and Miss Godfrey insisted upon the reasons for his doing so, in language which would probably have been endorsed by most of his Whig friends.

"As to your political opinions, it was very fine to indulge in them and act up to them while there was a distant perspective in so doing of fame or emolument, and at the same time a feeling that the triumph of such opinions, and the success of the party you belonged to, might be conducive to the prosperity of your country. But now, when those opinions have less and less influence, and that party less and less consideration—when your family is increasing and your wants, of course, increasing with it—don't you think prudence should have its turn? Would not your love for your wife and anxiety for the welfare of your children reconcile you to some little sacrifice of political opinions?"

The same line of argument was used to Moore at many junctures in his life and he always had the same answer. "More mean things," he told Rogers, "have been done in this world under the shelter of wife and children than under any pretext that worldly-mindedness can resort to."

The fact that the argument was so often used indicates that he lived always in the range of temptation; and many would blame him because he never had the inclination to sever himself from the connections which made it almost impossible for him to live frugally. Yet, apart from the argument that he helped the popularity of his music by singing his songs as no one else could sing them, it is clear that for much of his work—for all the satirical side of it—close touch with society was essential. Hardly less essential was it for the work of which his Sheridan was only the first instalment—his contribution to the literature of memoirs. On the other hand, it is clear that as the satirist, the observer, the historian, and the politician strengthened in him, they crowded out the poet. Life near Bowood meant life in contact with the leading politicians and thinkers of the day: Sloperton was very different from the seclusion of Mayfield. The question naturally arises, whether Moore, by encouraging his interest in contemporary events, and, generally speaking, in the prose side of life, stifled a higher gift, or whether he simply obeyed a sound and healthy impulse. The answer cannot be given without some detailed consideration of the work by which he took rank in his own generation—his equivalent for Scott's lays and Byron's romances.

Like them, Moore relied upon the charm of an exciting narrative, laid in unfamiliar scenes, and furnished with highly-coloured descriptive passages. But, whereas Scott wrote of the Border where he had been bred, and Byron of the East where he had travelled in days when the traveller was obliged to become a real part of every scene in which he moved, Moore laid his stories in a country known to him only through books, and he derived them from a literature remote and alien from all European sympathies. The natural consequence is that, whereas Scott's and Byron's descriptions savour of actual experience, Moore's reek of the lamp; and, with astonishing lack of judgment, he spoilt whatever illusion might exist, by the constant interposition of footnotes to explain the fragments of Eastern custom, tradition, or natural history, which he had laboriously wrought in. Nothing could more strongly stamp the artificial character of the whole. The truth, which Moore unhappily did not realise, is that poetry should be made, not out of things new but of things old; out of the familiar, not the unfamiliar. His research for novelty of subject was fatal to him; the attractions which he sought to give his work are those which poetry in the true sense must dispense with. Scott handled material wrought over a hundred times in Border ballads. Byron indeed made poetry from the novel, the strange, the obviously picturesque. But what keeps Byron's poetry alive is the element of personal emotion which Byron contributed to the subject. In so far as anything survives of Lalla Rookh, the same is true of Moore.

The introductory pages prefixed to Lalla Rookh in the 1841 edition of Moore's poems bear out this view. Moore relates his difficulties—his many attempts, begun and thrown aside. In one of these rejected stories, and only one, he writes, "had I yet ventured to involve that most homefelt of all my inspirations which has lent to the story of 'The Fire Worshippers' its main attraction and interest"—that half-veiled reference to Irish history and Irish aspirations, of which mention has already been made. Moore shrewdly observes that the absence of this sort of feeling in the other preliminary sketches—

"was the reason doubtless, though hardly known at the time to myself, that, finding my subjects so slow in touching my sympathies, I began to despair of their ever touching the hearts of others.... But at last—fortunately, as it proved—the thought occurred to me of founding a story on the fierce struggle so long maintained between the Ghebers, or ancient Fire Worshippers of Persia, and their haughty Moslem masters. From that moment a new and deep interest in my whole task took possession of me. The cause of tolerance was again my inspiring theme; and the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland soon found itself at home in the East."

It found itself about as much at home, I should say, as is the ordinary European in oriental costume at a masked ball. To wear Eastern clothes like an Eastern is possible, for one who has assimilated the Eastern way of life; otherwise, incongruities reveal themselves with every gesture. Byron, happier than Moore in his choice, wrote of an East that touches the West, of the clash between Frank and Moslem.

Worse still, Moore was an amatory poet, he had made successes by writing about love; and accordingly, he determined to rely in his poems—as Scott, wiser than he, had not done—on the love interest. He misunderstood his own temperament. Love poetry of the serious order demands passion, and Moore is the poet of dalliance, not of passion. The passion—if it can be called a passion—of pity, the passion of political enthusiasm, he had; but the violence of exclusive desire, whether lasting or temporary, which Byron so often rendered, was a chord outside of Moore's range.

The poets of Moore's own day, who knew and liked Moore, never cared for Lalla; and Leigh Hunt, an excellent critic, spoke the truth about it. Condemning the poem gently as "too florid in its general style," though allowing to it exquisite passages, he goes on:—

"You are so truly, by birth, a poetical animal, out of the pale of book-associations and a free inhabitant of the most Elysian parts of nature, that the more you resolved to speak and to feel out of the sincerity of your own impulses, without thinking it necessary to search for ideas, the more to your advantage I am persuaded it would be. You are a born poet and have only to claim your inheritance—not to be heaping up a multitude of anxious proofs which, though mistaken by some for ostentation, are in reality evidences of a diffidence of pretension which you ought not to feel."

No man could give better advice. Moore had written narrative poetry, one may safely say, because the fashion of the day was for narrative. He had caught at Rogers's suggestion of poetry on an Eastern theme, which was to give him a new field. As he worked on, he felt his theme alien, and tried to make himself at home in it by taking into the subject what really belonged to another atmosphere; and further, he decided that "he must try to make up for his deficiencies in dash and vigour by versatility and polish." Not in this way is poetry written; the poet who tries to accommodate himself to the taste of the public is destroying his art.

Moore had earned his fame by writings, amatory, political, and satirical, which it came natural to him to produce, because he was "a poetical animal"; Lalla Rookh was, in great measure, work done against the grain, and relying for its success on the secondary qualities of elaborate finish, profusion of ornament, and variety of interest. These qualities, however, were present in no common degree, and the poem's success is not to be wondered at. The dose of novelty in style was just sufficient to attract, without offending by its revolt against "the Popish sing-song." It was indeed so perfectly in the fashion of its time, as to be inevitably demoded after a lapse of years. The florid loops and curves of the Regency period in decorative art have their equivalent in Moore's profuse and lengthily elaborated metaphors. Certain features of the work must be unreservedly condemned. The prose narrative in which the four poems are set is deplorable—sprightly beyond endurance; and in the Veiled Prophet Moore tears one passion after another to tatters in bursts of sheer rhetoric. Yet even here good lines are plenty, though they are all in metaphors, or some other excrescence; for instance—

"Hundreds of banners to the sunbeam spread
Waved, like the wings of the white birds that fan
The flying throne of star-taught Soliman."

In Paradise and the Peri we have a production more within the poet's range. A prettier example of an Arabian Nights Tale, done into springing, easy verse, it would be difficult to find. The idea, neat and graceful, could have been treated within the compass of a song, which should tell how the exiled Peri was promised admittance if she brought "the gift that is most dear to Heaven"; how she tried first the patriot hero's life-blood—(shed in vain); then the last sigh of the maiden who chose to share the death of her true love; and, last of all, how she won home with the tear of repentance from a Byronic sinner. All through the poem there is the suggestion of singing, and, as Scott said, "Moore beats us all at a song."

From "The Fire Worshippers" I have quoted already the best passages, those which express most fully the germinal idea. One may add an energetic denunciation, which had its full application, for instance, to Leonard McNally, Emmet's advocate, who defended most of the Irish political prisoners during a long period of time, and regularly sold the secrets of his defence to the Government.

"Oh, for a tongue to curse the slave,
Whose treason, like a deadly blight,
Comes o'er the councils of the brave,
And blasts them in their hour of might!
May life's unblessed cup for him
Be drugg'd with treacheries to the brim,—
With hopes, that but allure to fly,
With joys, that vanish while he sips,
Like Dead-Sea fruits, that tempt the eye,
But turn to ashes on the lips!
His country's curse, his children's shame,
Outcast of virtue, peace, and fame,
May he, at last, with lips of flame,
On the parch'd desert thirsting die,—
While lakes, that shone in mockery nigh,
Are fading off, untouch'd, untasted,
Like the once glorious hopes he blasted!
And, when from earth his spirit flies,
Just Prophet, let the damn'd-one dwell
Full in the sight of Paradise,
Beholding heaven, and feeling hell!"

Last of all, and most lavishly decorated, is the story of the Feast of Roses at Cashmere. The opening passage is a good example of Moore's high-wrought effort after Eastern local colour:—

"Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere,
With its roses the brightest that earth ever gave,
Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear
As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave?
"Oh I to see it at sunset,—when warm o'er the Lake
Its splendour at parting a summer eve throws,
Like a bride, full of blushes, when ling'ring to take
A last look of her mirror at night ere she goes!—
When the shrines through the foliage are gleaming half-shown,
And each hallows the hour by some rites of its own.
Here the music of prayer from a minaret swells,
Here the Magian his urn full of perfume is swinging,
And here, at the altar, a zone of sweet bells
Round the waist of some fair Indian dancer is ringing.
Or to see it by moonlight,—when mellowly shines
The light o'er its palaces, gardens, and shrines;
When the waterfalls gleam like a quick fall of stars,
And the nightingale's hymn from the Isle of Chenars
Is broken by laughs and light echoes of feet
From the cool, shining walks where the young people meet.—
Or at morn, when the magic of daylight awakes
A new wonder each minute, as slowly it breaks,
Hills, cupolas, fountains, call'd forth every one
Out of darkness, as they were just horn of the sun,
When the Spirit of Fragrance is up with the day,
From his harem of night-flowers stealing away;
And the wind, full of wantonness, wooes like a lover
The young aspen-trees till they tremble all over.
When the East is as warm as the light of first hopes,
And Day, with his banner of radiance unfurl'd,
Shines in through the mountainous portal that opes,
Sublime, from that Valley of bliss to the world!"

But one finds a more real example of Moore's poetry in this quatrain:—

"There's a beauty, for ever unchangingly bright,
Like the long, sunny lapse of a summer day's light,
Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender,
Till Love falls asleep in its sameness of splendour."

If one compares passages like these with, for instance, Cowper's anapaests, even in so beautiful a poem as "The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade," it will be seen that Moore helped on the extraordinary advance in poetical technique which marks the years from 1795 to the rise of Tennyson. Moore's sense of style is always faulty—witness the very next couplet:—

"This was not the beauty—oh, nothing like this!
That to young Nourmahal gave such magic of bliss."

But he had a fine ear for metre, and in this poem he displayed all his resources, changing the rhythm half-a-dozen times, with interpolating bursts of song.

When, in addition, we remember that the most indolent reader could never for an instant mistake his meaning—that the volume of thought was always light as compared with the faculty of expression—that every harshness was carefully smoothed away, and condensation always sacrificed to limpidity—it is not hard to understand the poem's popularity. Yet, when all has been said, the last word is that Lalla Rookh is a work of very secondary merit, and retains its place in literature mainly as an example of an extinct taste. Twenty years after it was written, Moore knew this, and told Longman that, "in a race to future times (if any thing of mine could pretend to such a run), those little ponies, the Melodies, will beat the mare Lalla hollow." And indeed, if it were not for the Melodies, nobody would now give an eye to their stable companion.

[1] Parkinson.

[2] Alluding to Rogers's poem "Italy."

CHAPTER IV

PERIOD OF RESIDENCE ABROAD

Moore's residence on the Continent lasted three and a half years, and it formed an interlude in his life, interrupting what was otherwise a very continuous texture. The period was one of relative idleness, yet by no means of rest; and although whatever he produced during it was in verse, its close found the transition accomplished, from poet to man of letters.

The interlude opened with a real holiday, which was in truth amply deserved. After a fortnight's stay in Paris, spent in seeing theatres, sights, and a deal of company, Lord John Russell and his travelling companion posted off through France to Geneva; explored the associations of Ferney under the guidance of Dumont, the translator of Bentham, and sometime tutor to Lord Lansdowne; and then set out for the Alps. The passage over the Simplon, and the sight of the Jungfrau with the sunset-flush on its snows, so wrought upon Moore's emotions that he shed tears. At Milan the travellers parted company, Lord John proceeding to Genoa, while Moore's destinations were Venice and Rome. Travelling alone, in the "crazy little calèche" which he had been advised to buy, was no joy, and he gladly reached La Mira, Byron's country house, two hours' drive from Padua. The friends met for the first time after a separation of five years, and Moore's note of the occurrence is curiously lacking in warmth. The Byron whom he had known and liked so well was a different person from the Byron of Italy. Much had happened in the interval, and with a great deal of Byron's later, and maturer, work, Moore was very imperfectly in sympathy. Nor did the Countess Guiccioli much impress him. Byron, who had put his Venetian palace at Moore's disposal, commended him to his friend Scott, who showed the traveller round the place. A day or two later Byron came to Venice, and there was much intimate talk between the two men. On the 11th of October, Moore paid a farewell visit to La Mira and the Countess; and before the poets parted, a notable thing happened. Lord Byron handed to Moore the Memoirs of himself, of which Moore had heard for the first time a few days earlier.

From Padua to Ferrara and so to Florence we trace in the Diary rather a homesick gentleman, who begins to affect the virtuoso a little, and at the time to collect notes for an epistle on the cant of connoisseurs. In Florence he found some acquaintances, and they were in shoals before him at Rome, where he arrived in the end of October. During the three weeks of his stay here, Chantrey the sculptor and Jackson the painter—to the latter of whom Moore at this time sat—were his principal associates, and he left Rome in their company. His impressions of Italy savour a little too much of second-hand ideas to be of interest. Moore had, evidently enough, no education in art and yet was so susceptible to surrounding influences that his talk was all of pictures, statuary, buildings and so forth. His judgments on the music which he heard are in strong contrast, brief and confident—the utterance of a genuine taste. But the friendship formed with Chantrey seems to have been sympathetic and lasting, based on a common interest in human character.

On December 11th Moore arrived in Paris, and 'went as soon as I could with a beating heart to enquire for letters from home.' There were none of recent date, for the beloved Tom was ill, and Bessy would not write till the crisis was over; moreover, the Longmans wrote that nothing had as yet been settled in the Bermuda business, so that a return to England was impossible. "This is a sad disappointment," Moore writes,—"my dear cottage and my books. I must, however, lose no time in determining upon bringing Bessy and her little ones over; and wherever they are, will be home, and a happy one, to me."

Meanwhile, he took "an entresol in the Rue Chantereine at 250 fr. a month," and saw a deal of society, English and French, with potentates in plenty. But it did not console him. "I have no one here that I care one pin for, and begin to feel, for the first time, like a banished man," he wrote to Rogers; and a Christmas day apart from his family only deepened his gloom. But on January 1st, 1820, Bessy and her young ones landed safely in Paris, and things began to brighten singularly. "My dear tidy girl," Moore writes, "notwithstanding her fatigue, set about settling and managing everything immediately." Chief of the things settled was a resolution not to go into society, "which was tolerably adhered to for some time";—Moore meanwhile working at his "Fudge Family in Italy," a first draft of the poetical impressions which he published ultimately as Rhymes on the Road. After about a month, a successful move was made to "a very pretty cottage in the Allée des Veuves," somewhere in the Champs Élysées—"as rural and secluded a workshop as I have ever had," says Moore.

Gradually, however, virtue evaporated. The poet was beset with invitations, and, moreover, he owns to a sense of depression before the task of writing, "when the attention of all the reading world is absorbed by two writers, Scott and Byron." He had also a consciousness that his poetical essays in and upon connoisseurship were not the right thing; and finally, in June, after the whole had been set up by a French printer, it was decided to suppress the publication; Sir James Mackintosh having advised the Longmans, that the incidental satire on Castlereagh and other leading members of the Government would be injurious to Moore's interest, at a time when it might be possible to induce Government to drop its share of the claims against him; and Moore himself being influenced by the wish to publish nothing new till he had something of importance to produce.

In July the kindness of friends, M. Villamil, a Spanish gentleman, and his wife, enabled the Moores to move for the summer into pleasant quarters—a little pavillion in the grounds of the Villamils' house near Sèvres. Here the poet, still in pursuit of an important subject, returned to an idea which first germinated in his mind after the completion of Lalla—the story of a Greek who goes to Egypt in search of some philosophic secret, and during a celebration of the Egyptian priestly mysteries becomes enamoured of a young girl. She proves to be a Christian, and the hero is thus introduced to the secret communion. It is of course the basis of Moore's prose romance, The Epicurean, but his collected works contain a considerable fragment of Alciphron, his first sketch of it in verse, which dates from this time. Studies for the work brought him into touch with French savants, and the more Moore read upon the subject, the less he appears to have written. But the research drew him to Paris and away from his quarters in the "pavilion"; and when, in October, the household returned to its home in the Allée des Veuves, and Moore and his wife dined at home with the little ones for the first time since the beginning of July, "Bessy said in going to bed, 'This is the first rational day we have had for a long time.'"

Lord John Russell notes penitently on this passage, that he regrets his part in persuading Moore to prefer France to Holyrood, for "his universal popularity was his chief enemy." At no time did Moore suffer so much from being lionised, for his home was in easy reach of Paris, and in Paris French and English alike pursued this celebrity. Lalla Rookh was then at the height of its fame; was in the East being translated into Persian, and in the West transformed into a kind of masque which a troupe of royal amateurs presented at Berlin: and Lalla's poet was naturally much courted. Further, in the close of the year, there came a missive from Byron which was a fatal encouragement to idleness and outlay. He forwarded the continuation of the Memoirs, with the suggestion that Moore should sell the reversion of the MS. The suggestion was acted on after a while, and Murray consented to advance the large sum of 2000 guineas. Meanwhile engagements accumulated, and Moore began to lose health as well as time. He went into the world more and more as a bachelor, Bessy, as always, falling into the background when expenses grew high; though, at first, in Paris he and she went about a good deal together. Nevertheless, he wrote with all sincerity on March 25th, 1821:—

"This day ten years we were married, and though Time has made his usual changes in us both, we are still more like lovers than any married couple of the same standing I am acquainted with."

In the autumn, it was decided that Moore should come to England sub rosa, and try to compromise the Bermuda claims with a lump sum out of Murray's advance. He was met with dissuasion by his friendly publishers the Longmans, and it transpired finally that Lord Lansdowne had left £1000 with them to attempt a similar settlement. The kindness gratified Moore's best qualities, as well as his mild vanity, and though he declined to profit by it, he was greatly uplifted. From London he crossed to Dublin to see his parents after three years' separation—but the separation had made no breach, for Moore wrote twice every week to his mother. The visit was a short one, and he had some fears for his safety from arrest, as he had been widely recognised in Dublin. But on his return to town the publishers met him with joyful news. The chief claim had been settled for £1000, and he was free to "walk boldly out into the sunshine," and show himself up Bond Street and St. James's. Of this £1000, three hundred were extorted from Mr. Sheddon, uncle and recommender of the defaulting deputy; the rest was settled (as a compliment) out of Lord Lansdowne's money, but a draft on Murray was immediately sent him to repay the loan.

For the present, however, Moore lacked the means to move back to England, and he remained in Paris, where, in the summer of 1822, he at last settled down to a serious piece of work—his Loves of the Angels—"a subject," he says, "on which I long ago wrote a prose story and have ever since meditated a verse one." The work went quickly, a thousand lines were completed within two months; and in November, when the poet's friends in Paris mustered to give him a farewell dinner, allusion was made to the new poem as all but ready to appear. It was actually out before Christmas. By that time Moore was back and comfortably established at Sloperton (an intervening tenant having died seasonably), and here he found his study enlarged, his family well, and himself "most happy to be at home again." "Oh, quid solutis!"—he exclaims, recalling the lines of Horace which tell of the joy it is to shake off a load of care, and to rest after labours in a foreign land.

When the Angels appeared, the press was favourable, but Lady Donegal and a good many more protested vehemently against the application to profane purposes of the scriptural legend, which tells of the sons of God mating with daughters of men. Publishers are sensitive to this type of criticism, and the Longmans jumped at Moore's offer to remodel the poem, by giving it an Eastern cast, and "turning his poor Angels into Turks." Accordingly a fifth edition was produced, in which the metamorphosis was completed; but the disguise was soon abandoned, and Moore appears to have been ashamed of his concession, for in his preface to the poem in the 1841 edition, no mention is made of this recension.

The Loves of the Angels never attained to the popularity of Lalla Rookh, and yet it seems a much more praiseworthy composition. In the first place, Moore had chosen a subject that fell more within his range. Outside of light verse, his only themes were love and patriotism, and here we have the amatory poet indulging his genius to the full. The whole poem is about love-making—love-making in excelsis, and surrounded with accessories so decorative that they remove all hint of reality. One feels instinctively that the fierce accent of passion would be out of place here, and, consequently, does not censure the absence of it. His three fallen angels who meet and recall the loves for which they lost heaven, furnish three types of love-story, distinguished with all the care of a troubadour expert in la gaye science.

The first angel—one of a lower rank in heaven—is of look "the least celestial of the three," and, before the crisis in his story, has tasted

"That juice of earth, the bane
And blessing of man's heart and brain."

He is the one whom woman resisted—for Woman is throughout the poem all but deified; and his lady, to escape from the terrors of his love, as he comes to her after the wine-cup, steals the spell-word from him, and flies off to heaven, whither his wings can no longer follow. The second angel, a spirit of knowledge, is wooed by woman rather than her wooer, and at last is fated to destroy her with the death of Semele. Moore evidently thought that much knowledge was a dangerous thing for the sex. His ideal of womanhood is rather that depicted in the third story, of which the third angel is the subject, not the narrator. In this angel—

"That amorous spirit, bound
By beauty's spell, where'er 'twas found,"

who fell—

"From loving much,
Too easy lapse, to loving wrong,"

we may, I think, fairly trace some lineaments of Moore's conception of himself. For this seraph a gentler doom was decreed. He and his nymph are first drawn together by the snare of music, a snare even though in sacred song: for, as the poem tells—

"Love, though unto earth so prone,
Delights to take Religion's wing
When time or grief hath stained his own.
How near to Love's beguiling brink
Too oft entranced Religion lies!
While Music, Music is the link
They both still hold by to the skies."

The lovers meet at the altar, but they appeal to the altar to consecrate their vows. And thus the poem closes with a passage in celebration of connubial love, which, even though it perhaps seemed to Lady Donegal too bold a gloss on the text of Genesis, may very well have pleased the poet's Bessy; for we can be very certain that the poet was thinking more of Bessy than of Genesis when he wrote it. I shall quote the whole passage, which contains some lines that have hardly their equal in Moore's writings—notably the fine strain beginning, "For humble was their love,"—and, further on, the closing period which recalls, yet not by imitation, Wordsworth's scarcely more beautiful tribute to his wife:—

"Sweet was the hour, though dearly won,
And pure, as aught of earth could he,
For then first did the glorious sun
Before Religion's altar see
Two hearts in wedlock's golden tie
Self-pledged, in love to live and die.
Blest union! by that Angel wove,
And worthy from such hands to come;
Safe, sole asylum, in which Love,
When fall'n or exiled from above,
In this dark world can find a home.
"And though the spirit had transgress'd,
Had, from his station 'mong the blest
Won down by woman's smile, allow'd
Terrestrial passion to breathe o'er
The mirror of his heart, and cloud
God's image, there so bright before—
Yet never did that Power look down
On error with a brow so mild;
Never did Justice wear a frown
Through which so gently Mercy smiled.
"For humble was their love—with awe
And trembling like some treasure kept,
That was not theirs by holy law—
Whose beauty with remorse they saw,
And o'er whose preciousness they wept.
Humility, that low, sweet root,
From which all heavenly virtues shoot,
Was in the hearts of both—but most
In Nama's heart, by whom alone
Those charms, for which a heaven was lost,
Seem'd all unvalued and unknown;
And when her Seraph's eyes she caught,
And hid hers glowing on his breast,
Even bliss was humbled by the thought—
'What claim have I to be so blest?'
Still less could maid, so meek, have nursed
Desire of knowledge—that vain thirst,
With which the sex hath all been cursed,
From luckless Eve to her, who near
The Tabernacle stole to hear
The secrets of the angels: no—
To love as her own Seraph loved,
With Faith, the same through bliss and woe
Faith, that, were even its light removed,
Could, like the dial, fix'd remain,
And wait till it shone out again;—
With Patience that, though often bow'd
By the rude storm, can rise anew;
And Hope that, ev'n from Evil's cloud,
Sees sunny Good half breaking through!
This deep, relying Love, worth more
In heaven than all a Cherub's lore—
This Faith, more sure than aught beside,
Was the sole joy, ambition, pride
Of her fond heart—th' unreasoning scope
Of all its views, above, below—
So true she felt it that to hope,
To trust, is happier than to know.
"And thus in humbleness they trod,
Abash'd, but pure before their God;
Nor e'er did earth behold a sight
So meekly beautiful as they,
When, with the altar's holy light
Full on their brows, they knelt to pray,
Hand within hand, and side by side.
Two links of love, awhile untied
From the great chain above, but fast
Holding together to the last!
Two fallen Splendours, from that tree,
Which buds with such eternally,
Shaken to earth, yet keeping all
Their light and freshness in the fall.
"Their only punishment, (as wrong,
However sweet, must bear its brand,)
Their only doom was this—that, long
As the green earth and ocean stand,
They both shall wander here—the same,
Throughout all time, in heart and frame—
Still looking to that goal sublime,
Whose light remote, but sure, they see;
Pilgrims of Love, whose way is Time,
Whose home is in Eternity!
Subject, the while, to all the strife
True Love encounters in this life—
The wishes, hopes, he breathes in vain;
The chill, that turns his warmest sighs
To earthly vapour, ere they rise;
The doubt he feeds on, and the pain
That in his very sweetness lies:—
Still worse, th' illusions that betray
His footsteps to their shining brink;
That tempt him, on his desert way
Through the bleak world, to bend and drink,
Where nothing meets his lips, alas!—
But he again must sighing pass
On to that far-off home of peace,
In which alone his thirst will cease.
"All this they bear, but, not the less,
Have moments rich in happiness—
Blest meetings, after many a day
Of widowhood passed far away,
When the loved face again is seen
Close, close, with not a tear between—
Confidings frank, without control,
Pour'd mutually from soul to soul;
As free from any fear or doubt
As is that light from chill or stain,
The sun into the stars sheds out,
To be by them shed back again!—
That happy minglement of hearts,
Where, chang'd as chymic compounds are,
Each with its own existence parts,
To find a new one happier far!
Such are their joys—and, crowning all,
That blessed hope of the bright hour,
When, happy and no more to fall,
Their spirits shall, with freshen'd power,
Rise up rewarded for their trust
In Him, from whom all goodness springs,
And shaking off earth's soiling dust
From their emancipated wings,
Wander for ever through those skies
Of radiance, where Love never dies!"

There is nothing else in the poem at all so good as this. And even this would gain considerably by condensation, even by simple excisions. But the writing is consistently polished, easy, and—short of inspiration—even excellent. The opening may be quoted for a fine example:—

"'Twas when the world was in its prime,
When the fresh stars had just begun
Their race of glory, and young Time
Told his first birthdays by the sun;
When, in the light of Nature's dawn
Rejoicing, men and angels met
On the high hill and sunny lawn,
Ere sorrow came, or Sin had drawn
'Twixt man and heav'n her curtain yet!
When earth lay nearer to the skies
Than in those days of crime and woe,
And mortals saw without surprise,
In the mid air, angelic eyes
Gazing upon this world below."

Moore had abandoned the heroic couplet, and also the anapæstic measure, in favour of the eight-syllabled iambic, used with skilful variations of rhyme. And it is a proof of his matured judgment, that there is none of the tendency to melodrama which disfigures Lalla Rookh. He had realised that horror was not for him to convert to beauty; he tears no passion to tatters. Indeed, in the one instance where he plunges into a melodramatic subject, describing the fate of Lilis shrivelled to ashes by the embrace of her lover, and her unblest kiss, printed with "Hell's everlasting element," the vehemence is more impressive because more restrained.

At the same time, it does not seem probable that any current of taste will bring back either the Loves of the Angels or Lalla into popularity. Everywhere, even in the beautiful passage on wedlock's consolations, ornament is pushed to redundancy; there is no concentration in the style. The same looseness of texture may be observed in Scott and Byron, but Scott and Byron have behind their work a weight of personality which is lacking in Moore. They are moreover closer in touch with reality than Moore, who attributes to himself in the Diary "that kind of imagination which is chilled by the real scene and can best describe what it has not seen, merely taking it from the descriptions of others." He quotes Milton and Dante as instances where this kind of imagination produces the noblest work. One can only say—and Moore would have been prompt to agree—that Thomas Moore was neither Dante nor Milton; and for poets of a lower order we want close touch with fact. Moore's gift, indeed, was not imagination. His highest talent lay, like that of Horace, in giving expression to common emotions, which belong rather to a race, or a class, than to an individual, and which are consequently very general, though not very poignant, in their appeal.

A much higher rank may be claimed for him as a writer of satiric verse than of romantic narrative. The satiric inspiration with him long outlasted the other, for the Loves of the Angels was virtually the last poem published under his own name.[1] But under his other incarnation, as Thomas Brown the Younger, he contributed squibs to various newspapers and issued volumes for another dozen of years. The Odes on Cash, Catholics, and other matters, collected in 1828, show him to advantage, and we find something of the "wonted fires" even in The Fudges in England, published so late as 1835, after his brain had begun to flag. But for the top of his achievement in this kind one would always turn to the volume published a few months after The Loves of the Angels. This was the Fables for the Holy Alliance and Rhymes on the Road, comprising the work which he had cast and recast so often in Paris, together with a considerable handful of occasional verses.

From this general laudation, the Rhymes on the Road, Moore's impressions of Switzerland and Italy, must be excepted. Nothing in them repays perusal but the "Introductory Rhymes," with their ingenious and erudite discussion of the places and methods in which poets may compose—where Moore incidentally alludes to a favourite theory and practice of his own, which he supported by the example of Milton, as well as that here cited:—

"Herodotus wrote most in bed,
And Richerand, a French physician,
Declares the clockwork of the head
Goes best in that reclined position."

There is also a good skit on the ubiquitous English tourist, which ends with the vision of

"Some Mrs. Hopkins, taking tea
And toast upon the wall of China."