Born, in Dublin, 28 May 1779. At school in Dublin. Contrib. verses to “Anthologia Hibernica,” 1793. To Trin. Coll., Dublin, 1794; B.A., 1798 [or 1799?]. Student at Middle Temple, 1799. Admiralty Registrar at Bermuda, Aug. 1803. Left deputy in office and removed to New York, 1804; travelled in U.S.A. Returned to London, Nov. 1804. Contrib. to “Edinburgh Rev.” from 1806. Married Bessie Dyke, 25 March 1811. Settled near Ashbourne. Friendship with Byron begun, 1811. Visit to Paris, 1817. His deputy at Bermuda proved defaulter for £6,000, 1818. In Paris and Italy, 1819–22. Returned to England, April 1822; debt to Admiralty reduced to £1,000, and paid by Lord Landsdowne’s help. Settled in Wiltshire again, Nov. 1822. Literary Fund Pension, 1835; Civil List Pension, 1850. Died, 25 Feb. 1852. Buried at Bromham. Works: “The Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little” (pseud.), 1801; “Epistles, Odes, and other poems,” 1806; “Irish Melodies” (10 nos.), 1807–34; “Corruption and Intolerance” (anon.), 1808; “The Sceptic” (anon.), 1809; “Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin,” 1810 (2nd edn. same year); “M.P.,” 1811; “Intercepted Letters; or, the Twopenny Post-Bag” (under pseud. “Thomas Brown the Younger”), 1813 (11th edn. same year); “National Airs,” 1815; “Lines on the Death of [i.e., Sheridan”] (anon.), 1816; “The World at Westminster” (anon.), 1816; “Sacred Songs,” 1816; “Lalla Rookh,” 1817 (6th edn. same year); “The Fudge Family in Paris” (by “Thomas Brown the Younger”), 1818 (8th edn. same year); “Tom Crib’s Memorial” (anon.), 1819 (4th edn. same year); “Rhymes on the Road” (by “Thomas Brown the Younger”), 1823; “The Loves of the Angels,” 1823 (5th edn. same year); “Fables for the Holy Alliance” (by “Thomas Brown the Younger”), 1823; “Evenings in Greece” [1825?]; “The Fudges in England” (by “Thomas Brown the Younger”), 1825; “Memoirs of Captain Rock” (anon.), 1824; “Memoirs of the Life of Sheridan,” 1825 (3rd edn. same year); “The Epicurean,” 1827 (with addition of “Alciphron,” 1839); “Rhymes of the Times” (anon.), 1827; “Odes upon Cash, Corn, Catholics and other matters” (anon.), 1828; “Legendary Ballads” [1830?]; “The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald” (2 vols.), 1831; “The Summer Fête” [1831]; “Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion” (anon.), 1833; “History of Ireland” (in Lardner’s “Cabinet Cyclopædia,” 4 vols.), 1835–46; “Poetical Works,” 1840; “Songs, Ballads and Sacred Songs,” 1809. Posthumous: “Memoirs, Journals and Correspondence,” ed. by Earl Russell (8 vols.), 1853–56. He translated: “Odes of Anacreon,” 1800; and edited: Byron’s “Letters and Journals,” 1830; Sheridan’s Works, 1833; Byron’s Works, 1835.

Personal

  Moore has a peculiarity of talent, or rather talents,—poetry, music, voice, all his own; and an expression in each which never was, nor will be, possessed by another…. There is nothing Moore may not do, if he will but seriously set about it. In society, he is gentlemanly, gentle, and altogether more pleasing than any individual with whom I am acquainted.

  I saw Moore (for the first time I may say) this season. We had indeed met in public twenty years ago. There is a manly frankness, with perfect ease and good breeding about him which is delightful. Not the least touch of the poet or pedant. A little—very little man. Less, I think, than Lewis, and something like him in person; God knows not in conversation, for Matt, though a clever fellow, was a bore of the first description. Moreover, he always looked like a schoolboy. Now Moore has none of this insignificance. His countenance is plain, but the expression so animated, especially in speaking or singing, that it is far more interesting than the finest features could have rendered it.

  His forehead is bony and full of character, with “bumps” of wit, large and radiant enough to transport a phrenologist. His eyes are as dark and fine, as you would wish to see under a set of vine-leaves; his mouth generous and good-humored, with dimples; his nose sensual, prominent and at the same time the reverse of acquiline. There is a very peculiar character in it, as if it were looking forward, and scenting a feast or an orchard. The face, upon the whole, is Irish, not unruffled with care and passion, but festivity is the prominent expression.

  “I never spent an hour with Moore,” said Byron, “without being ready to apply to him the expression attributed to Aristophanes, ‘You have spoken roses;’ his thoughts and expressions have all the beauty and freshness of those flowers, but the piquancy of his wit, and the readiness of his repartees, prevent one’s ear being cloyed by too much sweets, and one cannot ‘die of a rose in aromatic pain’ with Moore; though he does speak roses, there is such an endless variety in his conversation. Moore is the only poet I know,” continued Byron, “whose conversation equals his writings; he comes into society with a mind as fresh and buoyant as if he had not expended such a multiplicity of thoughts on paper; and leaves behind him an impression that he possesses an inexhaustible mine equally brilliant as the specimens he has given us…. Moore is a delightful companion,” continued Byron, “gay without being boisterous, witty without effort, comic without coarseness, and sentimental without being lachrymose…. My tête-à-tête suppers with Moore are among the most agreeable impressions I retain of the hours passed in London…. I have known a dull man live on a bon mot of Moore’s for a week.”

  To see him only at table, you would think him not a small man. His principal length is in his body, and his head and shoulders are those of a much larger person. Consequently he sits tall, and with the peculiar erectness of head and neck, his diminutiveness disappears…. Moore’s head is distinctly before me while I write, but I shall find it difficult to describe. His hair, which curled once over it in long tendrils, unlike anybody else’s in the world, and which probably suggested his sobriquet of “Bacchus,” is diminished now to a few curls sprinkled with grey, and scattered in a single ring above his ears. His forehead is wrinkled, with the exception of a most prominent development of the organ of gaiety, which, singularly enough, shines with the lustre and smooth polish of a pearl, and is surrounded by a semicircle of lines drawn close about it, like entrenchments against Time. His eyes still sparkle like a champagne bubble, though the invader had drawn his pencillings about the corners; and there is a kind of wintry red, of the tinge of an October leaf, that seems enamelled on his cheek, the eloquent record of the claret his wit has brightened. His mouth is the most characteristic feature of all. The lips are delicately cut, slight and changeable as an aspen; but there is a set-up look about the lower lip, a determination of the muscle to a particular expression, and you fancy that you can almost see wit astride upon it. It is written legibly with the imprint of habitual success. It is arch, confident, and half diffident, as if he were disguising his pleasure at applause, while another bright gleam of fancy was breaking on him. The slightly tossed nose confirms the fun of the expression, and altogether it is a face that sparkles, beams, radiates,—everything but feels. Fascinating beyond all men as he is, Moore looks like a worldling.

  We saw Tom Moore in all his glory, looking, as Barclay said, “like a little Cupid with a quizzing-glass in constant motion.” He seemed as gay and happy as a lark, and it was pleasant to spend a whole evening in his immediate presence.

  It is Sloperton cottage which hereafter will be regarded with the chief interest as the residence of the poet. It stands in the midst of a delightful country, and though itself buried, as it were, in an ordinary thickly wooded lane, branching off to the left from the high-road, about two miles from Devizes, on the way to Chippenham, yet from its upper windows, as well as from its garden, enjoys peeps through the trees into lovely scenes. Down southward from the far end of the house opens the broad and noble vale toward Trowbridge; in front to the right, across a little valley, stands on a fine mount, amid nobly grown trees, the village of Bromham, with a gentleman’s house standing, boldly backed and flanked by the masses of wood, and the church spire peering above it. More to the left, in front, you look across some miles of country, and see the historical foreland of Roundaway hill, the termination of the chalk-hills of the Whitehouse-vale, proudly overlooking Devizes.

  Poor Mr. Moore! I knew him well, and, rating him as a poet much lower than you do, delighted in him as a companion and wit—the most perfectly graceful, genial, and kindly of all wits. As a family man, he was, I believe, more than usually amiable. My acquaintance with him was in town, but a dear friend of mine was his near neighbor and Mrs. Moore’s intimate friend at Sloperton and she says that she never knew a more exemplary husband and father.

  With a keen sense of enjoyment, he loved music and poetry, the world and the playhouse, the large circle of society, and the narrow precincts of his home. His heart was thrilled by deep feelings of devotion, and his mind expatiated over the wide field of philosophy. In all that he did, and wrote, and spoke, there was a freedom and a frankness which alarmed and delighted:—frightened old men of the world, and charmed young men and young women who were something better than the world…. Mrs. Moore brought him no fortune; indeed it was intended that she should earn her living by the stage, and Moore, afraid that so unworldly a match might displease his parents, at first concealed from them the fact of his marriage. But the excellence of his wife’s moral character; her energy and courage; her abhorrence of all meanness; her disinterested abstinence from amusement; her persevering economy; made her a better, and even a richer partner to Moore, than an heiress of ten thousand a year would have been with less devotion to her duty, and less steadiness of conduct.

  I was very much struck by his conversation. It was brilliant and sparkling in the highest degree, abounding in those Eastern images and poetical thoughts which appear with such lustre in his “Lalla Rookh” and “Irish Melodies,” mingled with the quick repartee and rapid interchange of ideas acquired in the highest and most intellectual London society. It was easy to see that he was thoroughly a poet; perhaps a little spoilt by the adulation he had met with from the most intoxicating of all quarters, that of elegant young women of fashion. Delightful and sociable, when he continued, as he generally was, the idol of the circle, he was apt to be pettish if another shared its attention, and in an especial manner to be jealous of the admiration of young ladies.

  Moore’s democracy did not prevent his being remarkably fond of the society of aristocrats. In his journal, he duly chronicles with what untiring perseverance he went to the mansions of noble lords and lovely or fashionable ladies; and how constantly he was inventing excuses for going to London, that he might mingle in their society,—they, to do justice to both, being as happy to receive him as he was to visit them. The compliment, in his case, was as much bestowed as received, if he only would have thought so. It was mean for Byron to say of Moore, as reported by Leigh Hunt on his return from Italy, “Tommy dearly loves a lord;” but it was meaner still, besides being spiteful, for Hunt to repeat it. Nevertheless, it was true. Moore was, I will not say happiest,—for he was a domestic man in his way,—but very happy, in the society of the peerage.

  His “Journals” curiously indicate what I repeatedly witnessed in my own house and elsewhere, his morbid sensitiveness when singing his Irish Ballads, to the effect they produced on those around him. In the most touching passages his eye was wandering around the room scrutinising jealously the influence of his song.

  He was a very little round-faced man, and had an easily worn but not unpleasant assurance. His estimates of persons seemed to depend much on their position or rank; he did not trouble himself to discuss persons who had no rank at all.

  Thomas Moore (or Tom Moore, as he was usually called) was small in stature and almost girlish in appearance when he came to the United States in 1804. He had been a “show child”—attractive and noteworthy almost from babyhood. He was a clever rhymer at the age of fourteen years, and at twenty he had earned fame as a poet, and was “patronized” and flattered by the Prince of Wales, afterward King George the Fourth. His face was small and intellectual in expression, sweet and gentle. His eyes were dark and brilliant; his mouth was delicately cut and full-lipped; his nose was slightly upturned, giving an expression of fun to his face; his complexion was fair and somewhat ruddy; his hair was a rich dark brown, and curled all over his head; his forehead was broad and strongly marked; and his voice, not powerful, was exquisitely sweet, especially when he was singing. Such is a description of Moore’s personal appearance at the time of his visit here, which was given me by Mrs. M—r, an elderly lady at Fredericksburg, Virginia, almost thirty years ago.

  Moore clung to Ireland with an intense and unchanging affection, which is testified by every act of his life and every page of his writings; and all who, now or hereafter, may cherish true attachment to her, whatever may be their honest varieties of sentiment, will find in him—when they have eliminated all they can disapprove in his dealings with temporary struggles and the passions they aroused—an Irishman with whose love for Ireland and constant desire to promote her welfare they can have cordial sympathy. According to his conception of her interests and his own duty, he was staunch to her, in periods of the worst discouragement as in those of the highest hope; and he refused for her sake, to falsify his convictions, when he might have gained place and power by giving even silent countenance to public action of which he disapproved. For these things, he should command the respect of men of every creed and party.

  I recall him at this moment—his small form and intellectual face rich in expression, and that expression the sweetest, the most gentle, and the kindliest. He had still in age the same bright and clear eye, the same gracious smile, the same suave and winning manner I had noticed as the attributes of what might in comparison be styled his youth (I have stated I knew him as long ago as 1821), a forehead not remarkably broad or high, but singularly impressive, firm and full, with the organs of music and gayety large, and those of benevolence and veneration greatly prepondering. The nose, as observed in all his portraits, was somewhat upturned. Standing, or sitting, his head was invariably upraised, owing, perhaps, mainly to his shortness of stature. He had so much bodily activity as to give him the attribute of restlessness, and no doubt that usual accompaniment of genius was eminently a characteristic of his. His hair was, at the time I speak of, thin and very gray, and he wore his hat with the jaunty air that has been often remarked as a peculiarity of the Irish. In dress, although far from slovenly, he was by no means precise. He had but little voice, yet he sang with a depth of sweetness that charmed all hearers; it was true melody, and told upon the heart as well as the ear. No doubt much of this charm was derived from association, for it was only his own melodies he sang…. I repeat I never knew a better man than Moore in all the relations of life; the best of God’s creatures may take him as a model without going wrong; and those who adopt literature as a profession can accept him as an example, in proof that genius may pass unscathed through seductions so perilous as to seem irresistible.

  “Anacreon Moore,” “The Bard of Erin,” “Jove’s Poet,” “The Lansdowne Laureate,” “The Pander of Venus,” “That Piperly Poet of Green Erin,” “Poor Little,” “Sweet, Melodious Bard,” “Trumpet Moore,” “The Young Catullus of His Day.”

  That Moore suffered no serious deterioration under the blandishments of society was very much owing to the influence of his high-minded wife. We get glimpses of this admirable woman in the fact that Rogers, who knew her well, was aware that he could give her no more acceptable present than five or ten sovereigns for her sick poor. She was once met at some festive gathering, when the hostess remarked, “You may be quite sure there is no one desperately ill or dying in the neighborhood, or we should not see Mrs. Moore here.” We must remember that there was no professional nurses in those days, and the aid of this kind, capable lady was often needed at the Hall as well as in the cottage.

Odes of Anacreon, 1800

  Moore’s early fancy luxuriated among the classics, and his elegant, spirited, and congenial translation—say rather paraphrase—of Anacreon was the first fruits.

  If we open a collection of his poems now, and read his “Odes of Anacreon,” to which the Prince of Wales and other notabilities of rank subscribed, we desist after a time with something of the disgust we should feel at a profuse display of pretty, sham jewelry. The ample, brimming bowls and goblets of wine, the wreaths and garlands of roses, the rich perfumes, the sparkling eyes, and the golden tresses, and the snowy necks, are well enough in moderation, but some eighty odes of such materials pall for lack of variety. Any variety that there is lies within the narrowest limits: now it is a bowl and now it is a goblet, now we drink and now we quaff, now it is a bud and now it is a full-blown rose, now a garland and now a cluster, now ringlets and now tresses; but it is always wine and flower, with little variation of phrase. We are soon surfeited with such sentiment, and disposed to laugh at its artificiality. Moore’s prettinesses, always expressed in soft and melodious verse, were probably a pleasant surprise to a generation weary of didactic poems; but if we have a liking for such things now, we can find more genuine articles of the same kind, compounded with much higher art, in the poetry of the seventeenth century, the volumes of Queen Henrietta’s poets, Lovelace, and Carew, and Suckling, and above all, Herrick.

Irish Melodies, 1807–34

  Now, of all the song-writers that ever warbled, or chanted, or sung, the best, in our estimation, is verily none other than Thomas Moore.

  There is a liquid ease, a dance of words, and a lyrical grace and brevity in them all; but there is, likewise, an epigrammatic point and smartness, a courtly and a knowing air, so to speak, alien to the simplicity of the music and to the nature of song…. In one word, there is not a little affectation in them, put-on graces, and artificial raptures. These faults are nearly balanced by beauties.

  By these his name will be known, so long as there are voices to sing and hearts to feel.

  The “Irish Melodies,” as songs, have never been surpassed in their particular kind. The versification is so exquisite, and executed with such delicacy of rhythm, that, on hearing them well read, we involuntarily and certainly conceive the tune, even though we may never have heard it.

  His Irish and national melodies will be immortal: and they will be so for this reason,—that they express the feelings which spring up in the breast of every successive generation at the most important and imaginative period of life. They have the delicacy of refined life without its fastidiousness, the warmth of natural feeling without its rudeness.

  In one only of his writings Moore attained a positive perfection of style. Those homely and sentimental lyrics which have endeared themselves to thousands of hearts under the name of the “Irish Melodies,” form a part and parcel of our literature, the extinction of which would leave a sad blank behind it.

  It provided him with a solid basis for his reputation of making him the national lyrist of Ireland, a character which, notwithstanding the numerous charges which may justly be brought against his “Irish Melodies,” on the ground both of false poetry and false patriotism, he must retain until some one arises to deprive him of it. Better isolated pieces have no doubt been written by some of his successors, but he, and he alone, has produced an imposing body of national song; nor have his fancy, melody, and pathos, on the whole, been yet equalled by any competitor.

  No such distinguished success was ever before, or has ever since, been achieved in the not very distinguished art of “writing up to” music. The “Irish Melodies,” it is true, show many marks of their conventional origin; they are in a certain sense artificial products, altogether wanting in the freshness and naïveté, the epic force and simplicity of the genuine folksong; but they were the work of a man in whom the melancholy charm of his country and of his country’s music inspired a feeling so genuine and, indeed, so intense as continually to lift, if it could not consistently maintain, his expression above the level of the commonplace. It is the lack of this emotional sincerity which leaves his more ambitious efforts comparatively cold and lifeless, and has consigned “Lalla Rookh” to an oblivion which the “Irish Melodies” and a few other lyrics of Moore’s have escaped.

  The chief characteristic of Moore’s Irish melodies, that is to say the lyrics, is their lack of Irish characteristics. To be candid, though here and there an Irish town, or vale, or waterfall, or lake is mentioned, all the Irish songs are absolutely English in form, metre and sentiment. Erin comes in nowhere; and Hibernia is only scantily and half shamefully referred to as a sort of apology for the music which is so essentially Irish. Again the words are not always wedded to the music, they are only joined to it, fitted and fixed to it—the music plays the second part and not the first. Though Thomas Moore, “who dearly loved a lord,” as his friend Lord Byron said, was a poet of Ireland, he was in nowise an Irish poet in sentiment, sympathy or sensibility. Still we are not ungrateful to him for his labour in saving to us these classic pieces.

Lalla Rookh, 1817

  I have read two pages of “Lalla Rookh,” or whatever it is called. Merciful Heaven! I dare read no more, that I may be able to answer at once to any questions, “I have but just looked at the work.” O Robinson! if I could, or if I dared, act and feel as Moore and his set do, what havoc could I not make amongst their crockery-ware! Why, there are not three lines together without some adulteration of common English, and the ever-recurring blunder of using the possessive case, “compassion’s tears,” &c., for the preposition “of,”—a blunder of which I have found no instances earlier than Dryden’s slovenly verses written for the trade.

  There is something very extraordinary, we think, in the work before us—and something which indicates in the author, not only a great exuberance of talent, but a very singular constitution of genius. While it is more splendid in imagery—(and for the most part in very good taste)—more rich in sparkling thoughts and original conceptions, and more full indeed of exquisite pictures, both of all sorts of beauties and virtues, and all sorts of sufferings and crimes, than any other poem that has yet come before us; we rather think we speak the sense of most readers when we add, that the effect of the whole is to mingle a certain feeling of disappointment with that of admiration! to excite admiration rather than any warmer sentiment of delight—to dazzle, more than to enchant—and, in the end, more frequently to startle the fancy, and fatigue the attention, by the constant succession of glittering images and high-strained emotions, than to maintain a rising interest, or win a growing sympathy, by a less profuse or more systematic display of attractions. The style is, on the whole, rather diffuse, and too unvaried in its character. But its greatest fault, in our eyes, is the uniformity of its brilliancy—the want of plainness, simplicity and repose.

  Mr. Moore ought not to have written “Lalla Rookh,” even for three thousand guineas. His fame is worth more than that. He should have minded the advice of Fadladeen. It is not, however, a failure, so much as an evasion and a consequent disappointment of public expectation. He should have left it to others to break conventions with nations, and faith with the world. He should, at any rate, have kept his with the public. “Lalla Rookh” is not what people wanted to see whether Mr. Moore could do—namely, whether he could write a long epic poem. It is four tales. The interest, however, is often high wrought and tragic, but the execution still turns to the effeminate and voluptuous side.

  Moore is but a sort of refined Mahometan, and (with immense deference) I think that his character in a late “Edinburgh Review” is somewhat too high. His imagination seldom quits material, even sexual objects—he describes them admirably,—and intermingles here and there some beautiful traits of natural pathos; but he seems to have failed (excepting partially in the Fire-Worshippers) in his attempts to portray the fierce or lofty features of human character. Mokannah in particular, insensible to pain or pity or any earthly feeling, might as well, at least for all practical purposes, have been made of clockwork as of flesh and blood. I grieve to say that the catastrophe excited laughter rather than horror. The poisoned believers sitting round the table, with their black swollen jobber-nowls reclining on their breasts, and saucy-eyes fixed upon the ill-favoured prophet—appeared so like the concluding scene of an election-dinner, when all are dead-drunk but the Provost, a man of five bottles, with a carbuncled face and an amorphous nose, that I was forced to exclaim, Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas.

  He has shewn in the poetry selected for the “Irish Melodies,” and more so in his celebrated “Lalla Rookh,” how beautifully the feelings of a delicate passion can be conveyed in language of the most brilliant and powerful description.

  When Moore is termed “a fanciful poet,” the epithet is applied with precision. He is. He is fanciful in “Lalla Rookh,” and had he written the “Inferno,” in the “Inferno” he would have contrived to be still fanciful and nothing beyond.

  Its great charm consists in the romance of its situations and characters, the splendour of its diction and style, and the prodigal copiousness of its imagery. Indeed, its principal fault is want of repose; it is overloaded with ornament: you cannot see the green turf for roses; you cannot see the blue heavens for stars; and the narrative is thus clogged, while its interest is marred.

  It is still possible to read “Lalla Rookh” with pleasure, and even with a sort of indulgent enthusiasm. Rococo prettiness could hardly reach a higher point of accomplishment, and the sham-oriental is perhaps not more hopelessly antiquated than our own sham-mediæval will be sixty years hence. The brilliance of Moore’s voluptuous scenes has faded; he gilded them too much with the gold of Mrs. Tighe’s “Psyche,” a preparation that was expressly made to tarnish. But underneath the smooth and faded surface lie much tenderness and pathos in the story of the Peri, much genuine patriotism in the fate of the Fire Worshippers, much tropical sweetness in the adventures of the “Light of the Haram.” These narratives possess more worth, for instance, than all but the very best of Byron’s tales, and would be read with more pleasure than those were they not overburdened by a sensuous richness of style. This quality, which Moore considered his chief claim to immortality, was in point of fact a great snare to him.

  A dainty confection of Eastern romance.

  It still seems to me a very respectable poem indeed of the second rank. Of course it is artificial. The parade of second, or third or twentieth-hand learning in the notes makes one smile, and the whole reminds one (as I dare say, it has reminded many others before) of a harp of the period with the gilt a little tarnished, the ribbons more than a little faded, and the silk stool on which the young woman in ringlets used to sit much worn. All this is easy metaphorical criticism, if it is criticism at all. For I am not sure that, when the last age has got a little further off from our descendants, they will see anything more ludicrous in such a harp than we see in the faded spinnets of a generation earlier still. But much remains to Lalla if not to Feramorz. The prose interludes have lost none of their airy grace. Even Mr. Bernard has not been able to make Mokanna ridiculous, nor have the recent accounts of the actual waste of desert and felt huts banished at least the poetical beauty of “Merou’s bright palaces and groves.”

  “Lalla Rookh” may be little read nowadays; but not many years have passed since this poem and others of the author’s used to get into the finest of bindings, and have great currency for bridal and birthday gifts. Indeed, there is a witching melody in Moore’s Eastern tales, and a delightful shimmer and glitter of language, which none but the most cunning of our present craftmasters in verse could reach.

Life of Lord Byron, 1830

  Moore will have a ticklish task to perform all through, and if he brings me in, which he can hardly help doing, I may, perhaps, make him cry O, if he does not take care of his p’s and q’s.

  We have read this book with the greatest pleasure. Considered merely as a composition, it deserves to be classed among the best specimens of English prose which our age has produced. It contains, indeed, no single passage equal to two or three which we could select from the “Life of Sheridan;” but, as a whole, it is immeasurably superior to that work. The style is agreeable, clear, and manly; and when it rises into eloquence, rises without effort or ostentation. Nor is the matter inferior to the manner. It would be difficult to name a book which exhibits more kindness, fairness, and modesty. It has evidently been written, not for the purpose of showing, what, however, it often shows, how well its author can write; but for the purpose of vindicating, as far as truth will permit, the memory of a celebrated man.

  The poet could not forecast that Moore would get the money and not publish the book; that his bibliopolist’s compilation—all puff and laudation to sell his stock—would be substituted—a lifeless life, giving no notion of the author, nothing told as Byron told it, and, excepting the letters it contains, unreadable and unread. Byron could not escape the poet’s fate—his true life suppressed, and a bookish, elaborate eulogy of his poetry to sell his works substituted.

  Moore’s vice is cautious, soft, seductive, slippery, and covered at times with a thin, tremulous veil of religious sentimentalism. In regard to Byron, he was an unscrupulous, committed partisan: he was as much bewitched by him as ever man has been by woman; and therefore to him, at last, the task of editing Byron’s Memoirs was given. This Byron, whom they all knew to be obscene beyond what even their most drunken tolerance could at first endure; this man, whose foul license spoke out what most men conceal from mere respect to the decent instincts of humanity; whose “honor was lost,”—was submitted to this careful manipulator, to be turned out a perfected idol for a world longing for one, as the Israelites longed for the calf in Horeb.

  Murray eventually gave £4,200 for one of the most delightful and entertaining biographies in our literature—a companion volume, in every way, to Boswell’s “Johnson” and Lockhart’s “Scott.”

  It was exactly the biography which that age required: by no means complete or entirely authentic, nor claiming to be so, but presenting Byron in the light in which contemporaries desired to regard him, and in every respect a model of tact and propriety. The fearless criticism and the deep insight which are certainly missing were not at that time required, and until they are supplied elsewhere the work will rank as a classic, even though its interest be less due to the efforts of Moore’s own pen than to the charm of the letters which he was the first to give to the world.

History of Ireland, 1835–46

  See also the first volume of Moore’s “History of Ireland,” where the claims of his country are stated favourably and with much learning and industry, but not with extravagant partiality.

  Moore wasted much time on uncongenial tasks, such as his “History of Ireland.” He bestowed great pains upon it, but the result proved that he had spent his strength in vain. His great and lasting achievement is to have set forth and lamented in exquisite verse the sorrows and wrongs of his native land. Moore’s admirers can forgive his shortcomings as the historian of Erin when they regard him as its bard.

  The last years of his life were spent in writing a “History of Ireland,” now quite unknown. He persisted in this work, and this gives us a higher idea of his character. With all his apparent affectation he was a genuine patriot, an industrious worker, and a most exemplary son and husband, and there is no doubt that it was these qualities that helped to make him the darling of the London drawing-rooms.

General

  Moore’s poems and his translations will, I think, have more influence on the female society of this kingdom, than the stage has had in its worst period, the reign of Charles II. Ladies are not ashamed of having the delectable Mr. Little on their toilet, which is a pretty good proof that his voluptuousness is considered as quite veiled by the sentimental garb in which it is clad. But voluptuousness is not the less dangerous for having some slight resemblance of the veil of modesty. On the contrary, her fascinations are infinitely more powerful in this retiring habit than when she boldly protrudes herself on the gazer’s eye, and openly solicits his attention. The broad indecency of Wycherley, and his contemporaries, was not half so dangerous as this insinuating and half-covered mock-delicacy, which makes use of the blush of modesty in order to heighten the charms of vice.

  He … may boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious of modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, have devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality. We regard his book, indeed, as a public nuisance, and would willingly trample it down by one short movement of contempt and indignation, had we not reason to apprehend that it was abetted by patrons who are entitled to a more respectful remonstrance and by admirers who may require a more extended exposition of their dangers…. It seems to be his aim to impose corruption upon his readers by concealing it under the mask of refinement; to reconcile them imperceptibly to the most vile and vulgar sensuality by blending its language with that of exalted feeling and tender emotion; and to steal impurity into their hearts, by gently perverting the most simple and generous of their affections. In the execution of this unworthy task he labours with a perseverance at once ludicrous and detestable…. A publication which we would wish to see consigned to universal reprobation.

  Mr. Moore’s Muse is another Ariel, as light, as tricksy, as indefatigable, and as humane a spirit. His fancy is forever on the wing, flutters in the gale, glitters in the sun. Every thing lives, moves, and sparkles in his poetry, while over all love waves his purple light…. The fault of Mr. Moore is an exuberance of involuntary power. His facility of production lessens the effect of, and hangs as a dead weight upon, what he produces. His levity at last oppresses. The infinite delight he takes in such an infinite number of things, creates indifference in minds less susceptible of pleasure than his own. He exhausts attention by being inexhaustible. His variety cloys; his rapidity dazzles and distracts the sight. The graceful ease with which he lends himself to every subject, the genial spirit with which he indulges in every sentiment, prevents him from giving their full force to the masses of things, from connecting them into a whole. He wants intensity, strength, and grandeur. His mind does not brood over the great and permanent: it glances over the surfaces, the first impressions of things, instead of grappling with the deep-rooted prejudices of the mind, its inveterate habits, and that “perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.” His pen, as it is rapid and fanciful, wants momentum and passion. It requires the same principle to make us thoroughly like poetry, that makes us like ourselves so well, the feeling of continued identity.

  Anacreon Moore, too, has been nearly put out by the ascending star of his Lordship’s genius; and his sprightly, luxurious levity, has yielded to the more energetic force of heroic debaucheries. The laughing lyrics of the one have given precedence to the passionate heroics of the other, seasoned as they both were with about the same proportion of the salt of sensuality. Moore’s epigrammatic license is fast fading before the tragic profligacy of Childe Harold’s abstraction, aided by the comical wickedness of Don Juan, who reduces to practice the theory of the Childe. Certain it is, that Moore has either degenerated in fancy and sprightliness, or the world has become tired of the tinkling of his pretty little fingers. I think he will scarcely last out another fashionable age.

  I take it for granted that you have seen Cupid’s “Loves of the Angels.” What beautiful air-grown bubbles! Was ever such a string of pearly words so delightfully and so absurdly congregated before?

  Yes, I have read Moore’s “Sheridan,” and was deeply interested. But, my dear friend, it is more the excuse of an admirer than the impartial memoir of a biographer.

  In Moore’s style, the ornament continually outstrips the sense.

  “The Loves of the Angels” is an invaluable gem, which will rank, not with the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” but with the “Rape of the Lock.” Sometimes, indeed, we cannot help thinking that the author might have periwigged his angles with advantage. But I beg pardon—it is no longer fashionable for young coxcombs to wear wigs.

  His radiance, not always as bright as some flashes from other pens, is yet a radiance of equable glow, whose total amount of light exceeds by very much, we think, that total amount in the case of any contemporary writer whatsoever. A vivid fancy, an epigrammatic spirit, a fine taste, vivacity, dexterity, and a musical ear have made him very easily what he is, the most popular poet now living, if not the most popular that ever lived; and, perhaps, a slight modification at birth of that which phrenologists have agreed to term temperament, might have made him the truest and noblest votary of the Muse of any age or clime. As it is, we have only casual glimpses of that mens divinior which is assuredly enshrined within him.

  His notion of Paradise comes from the Koran, not the New Testament. His works are pictorial representations of Epicurianism. Pathos, passion, sentiment, fancy, wit, are poured melodiously forth in seemingly inexhaustible abundance, and glitter along his page as though written down with sunbeams; but they are still more or less referable to sensation, and the “trail of the serpent is over them all.” He is the most superficial and empirical of all the prominent poets of his day. With all his acknowledged fertility of mind, with all his artistical skill and brilliancy, with all his popularity, he never makes a profound impression on the soul, and few ever think of calling him a great poet, even in the sense in which Byron is great. He is the most magnificent trifler that ever versified. Nothing can be finer than his sarcasm, nothing more brilliant than his fancy, nothing more softly voluptuous than his sentiment. But he possesses no depth of imagination, no grandeur of thought, no clear vision of purity and holiness. He has neither loftiness nor comprehension. Those who claim for him a place among the immortals, are most generally girls who thrum pianos, and who are conquered by the “dazzling fence” of his rhetoric, and the lightning-like rapidity with which he scatters fancies one upon another. He blinds the eye with diamond dust, and lulls the ear with the singing sweetness of his versification. Much of his sentiment, which fair throats warble so melodiously, is merely idealized lust. The pitch of his thought and feeling is not high. The impression gained from his works is most assuredly that of a man variously gifted by nature, adroit, ingenious, subtle, versatile, “forgetive”—a most remarkable man, but not a great poet. Nothing about his works “wears the aspect of eternity.”

  As a poet Moore must always hold a high place. Of English lyrical poets he is surely the first.

  Moore had in his time many imitators, but all his gayety, his brilliant fancy, his somewhat feminine graces, and the elaborate music of his numbers, have not saved him from the fate of being imitated no more.

  In this multitude of travellers and historians, disguised as poets, how shall we select? They abound like swarms of insects hatched on a summer’s day amidst the rank of vegetation; they buzz and glitter, and the mind is lost in their sparkle and hum. Which shall I quote? Thomas Moore, the gayest and most French of all, a witty railer, too graceful and recherché, writing descriptive odes on the Bermudas, sentimental Irish melodies, a poetic Egyptian romance, a romantic poem on Persia and India.

  Moore is nothing in my opinion, and never would have been anything but for the lovely music he is identified with.

  As to the songs and other poems one can seldom imagine that they were written in the open air, in the woods or fields, or in the face of nature. There is (so to speak) always a boudoir or indoor air about them: the very flowers seem to be artificial. Mr. Moore’s verses are also too saccharine: they want substance and relief. One may be smothered even with roses; and if the roses want their natural dew and freshness, the suffocation becomes unpleasant.

  In Satire, it must be admitted that Moore is entitled to a distinguished place. Not, indeed, that he wielded the massive and ruthless weapon of the great Roman, the cutting lash of Ariosto and Dryden, the delicate scalpel of Boileau and Pope, or the poisoned dagger of Junius. The edge of his sarcasm seems turned by its wit, and the smile of the archer to blunt his arrow’s point.

  In the cosmical diapason and august orchestra of poetry, Tom Moore’s little Pan’s-pipe can at odd moments be heard, and interjects an appreciable and rightly-combined twiddle or two. To be gratified with these at the instant is no more than the instrument justifies, and the executant claims: to think much about them when the organ is pealing or the violin playing (with a Shelley performing on the first, or a Mrs. Browning on the second) or to be on the watch for their recurrences, would be equally superfluous and weak-minded.

  He not only produced the most exquisite songs in the language, but he concurrently composed some of the best satires that were ever written. Birth had made Moore an advocate for rebellion. Society had stripped his advocacy of it of every shadow of bitterness.

  No one would go to Moore expecting to find the robust vigour, condensed wisdom, and epigrammatic point of a Shakspere or a Burns; but sentiment, though less deep and more diffuse, may still be true and touch our hearts.

  He shone as a morning star in the awakening eye of the nineteenth (century); and though he was apt to disfigure his songs by what he meant for a crowning ornament—a metaphor artificially set forth, and too much like “the posy of a ring,”—yet in his more genuine poetic moods, whether plaintive or festive, or, as he could sometimes contrive it, a graceful combination of the two, he could not but charm an audience who had forgotten the songsters of Elizabeth and James, and, so far as the poetry of song was concerned, had had nothing better to listen to in their own times than what was called “the Della Cruscan school,” or “the school of Laura Matilda.”

  Nearly every line he wrote is pregnant with platitude and literary affectations; nearly every song he sang is either playfully, or forlornly, or affectedly, genteel; and though he had a musical ear, he was deficient in every lofty grace, every word-compelling power, of the divine poetic gift. Above all, he lacked simplicity—that one unmistakable gift of all great national poets, form Homer downwards. And the cardinal defect of the verse was the true clue to the thoroughly artificial character of the man…. I have granted the merit of Moore’s verses and the amusing nature of his personality; but I must protest in the name of justice against his acceptance as the national poet of Ireland. If Irishmen accept him and honour him as such, so much the worse for Irishmen, since his falsehood of poetic touch must respond to something false and unpoetic in their own natures.

  His prose, less known than his poetry, is facile, elegant, and, on the whole, correct.

  “Surely you must have been born with a rose in your lips, and a nightingale singing on the top of your bed,” said Samuel Rogers to Moore; and there is much significance in the conceit. Moore’s poems are full of colour, while their melody is almost faultless. His verse is sensuous and sweet. It seldom reached passion or heroic aspiration. There is no profound depth of thought, no far insight of human nature or character. But it is full of airy fancies which are wrought into musical numbers characterised by exquisite finish which at its best shows no signs of elaboration. The flow and modulation of his lines give them an immediate affinity to music, and it seems but in the natural order of things that they should have been sung in a tender, sympathetic voice by the poet himself. Moore’s songs still live in popular appreciation now that “Lalla Rookh” is seldom read, and its splendors—astonishing as they are—have to a great extent ceased to hold the fancy of a younger generation. Even his Irish patriotic songs are remembered with something of the thrill which they have caused when they were sung in fashionable drawing-rooms more than half a century ago.

  It was a society which loved bric-à-brac, and Moore gave it bric-à-brac poetry of the best kind. Never was it better done; and the verse had a melodious movement, as of high-bred and ignorant ladies dancing on enamelled meadows, which pleased the ear and almost seemed to please the eye. He was quite, then, in harmony with the society for which he wrote, and it would be rather surly of us if we judged him altogether from our standard of poetry and abused him for complying with the taste of his time. No one dreams of comparing him with the greater men, or of giving his poetry too important a place in the history of English song. But the man whose work Byron frankly admired; whom Scott did not dispraise; who received letters of thanks and appreciation from readers in America, Europe, and Asia; who fulfilled Mathew Arnold’s somewhat foolish criterion of a poet’s greatness by being known and accepted on the Continent; whom the Italians, French, Germans, Russians, Swedes, and Dutch translated; whose “Lalla Rookh” was partly put into Persian, and became the companion of Persians, on their travels and in the streets of Ispahan; to whom publishers like Longmans gave 3,000l. for a poem before they had even seen it, “as a tribute to reputation already acquired”—can scarcely be treated with the indifferent contempt which some have lavished upon him. He pleased, and he pleased a very great number. Time has altered that contemporary verdict, and rightly—but when it is almost universal, not merely the verdict of a clique, it counts.