character who could be led under any circumstances to criminate his associates." Having obtained his degree of Bachelor of Arts, Moore proceeded to London with a view of qualifying himself for the bar-his name having previously been entered on the books of the Middle Temple-and the dearer object of publishing his translations of Anacreon. How touchingly he describes the ever-ministering, self-denying tenderness of that mother, who scraped together out of the scanty rescurces of her family those hoarded moneys that were to furnish forth him on whom all her hopes were centred. "A part of the small sum I took with me was in guineas, and, I recollect, was carefully sewed up by my mother in the waistband of my pantaloons. There was also another treasure which she had, unknown to me, sewed up in some other part of my clothes, and that was a scapular (as it is called), or small bit of cloth blessed by the priest, which a fond superstition inclined her to believe would keep the wearer of it from harm. And thus with this charm about me, of which I was wholly unconscious, and my little packet of guineas, of which I felt deeply the responsibility, did I for the first time start from home for the great world of London."

The great world of London! That world whose peopled wastes have witnessed the struggles, and the sorrows, and the folly, and the ruin of so many a child of genius. Otway "naked in the rage of hunger," choked by the mouthful of bread that casual charity supplied to him; Chatterton wandering about the streets "in a perpetual state of fever and excitement," without the means of keeping body and soul together, and coming home o' nights to keep the vigil of an over-wrought brain and a hand ever labouring with the pen, till poison, self-administered, consigned him to the felon's doom and an ignominious grave in Shoe Lane Workhouse; aye, and Moore's own countryman, Goldsmith, sleeping with the beggars in Axe Lane; and Dermody dying in a hovel, crouching chill and starved over a few embers, with the rain and wind beating in upon his last hour, the only mourners whose tears and sighs attended his horrible death-bed; and Gerald Griffin-but not till a later day-heart-broken and paralyzed, writing amid intolerable agonies. The great world of London! Yes, great, too, in the noblest sense of greatness; great in her energizing vitality, with the strong life-blood of labour beating pulse-like through every street and court and lane; great in her charities; great in her literary funds and authors' societies to help the meritorious struggler; the London of Thackeray and Dickens, and many another who have fought well and bravely the battle of the brain and the pen, and have won it, and after the victory stretch out the hand to help those that are battling still. But for Moore London had no trials in reserve. Pleasant acquaintances were secured for him, and amongst them his own countryman, yet to become illustrious as the President of the Royal Academy, Martin Archer Shee. No doubt the fame of the young poet-for many of his translations of Anacreon had ere this been read and admired-had preceded him to London; and we learn from his letters home that he was making his way in society. Dr. Hume aided him in procuring a publisher; Dr. Lawrence read his Anacreon with the eye of a critic and the heart of a friend; Johnson, of Covent Garden, began to sing his songs in company, and through him he became acquainted with the theatrical stars of the day; and above all, he was introduced to that distinguished soldier and statesman, Francis, Earl of Moira, and afterwards the first Marquis of Hastings. A short visit to home, and Moore is again in London. All goes on, as he says himself, "swimmingly." It is

evident the brilliant little Irish youth, just turned of twenty, wh. sings his own sparkling songs to his own exquisite inartistic accompaniment is, not a lion as yet to be regarded with awe, but like a lapdog, to be petted and praised by gay cavaliers and lovely women fluttering around him; and we learn from outbursts of enthusiasm, and exultant and most pardonable vanity, in his letters to his mother, how much his company is sought after, and how he goes out to dinner and then to parties in the evening-"This is the way we live in London; no less than three every evening. Vive la bagatelle !" Henceforth we hear no more of the bar. He has given himself up for ever to letters. Anacreon is now ready to revel in his English garb in London. The subscription list fills. One line to her of whom no whirl of dissipation, no seductions of society, can ever make him forgetful, announces that the summit of his ambition is obtained: "I have got the prince's name, and his permission that I should dedicate Anacreon to him. Hurra! Hurra!" Out comes, just when he was entitled to write himself full man, "The Odes of Anacreon, translated into English verse, with Notes," dedicated to the Prince of Wales-whose manners fascinated the young poet, as they fascinated all-the object for a time of his eulogy and admiration, as he was in after years of his scathing satire. It was a bold and a perilous undertaking for a first essay of an author, for he had to measure himself with other masters of song who had preceded him. No one, however, can for a moment hesitate to award the palm to Moore. It is true that he is often paraphrastic, sometimes more diffuse, occasionally more voluptuous, than his Teian original. Be it so; but he has deeply imbibed the spirit and the odour of those exquisite Greek lyrics, transfused and assimilated into his own nature, till they are reproduced in his verse with all that musical rhythm, that charming simplicity, that richness of colouring, that delicacy of sentiment and grace of expression, which make Anacreon one of the most delightful of lyric poets. The work was a success, and in some sort a sensation; and it received its full share both of critical censure and of generous praise. Moore was now in the very vortex of the gay and fashionable society of London, and his letters testify how keenly he relished the petits soupers after the opera with the prince and Mrs. Fitzherbert and the wits and celebrities whom he met at aristocratic mansions of the Devonshires, the Donegalls, and the Corks. With Lord Moira he was an honoured and a constant guest at Donington Park, hunting among old books, and "in the evening singing down the sun like a true Pythagorean." The poet was not, however, merged in the Pythagorean, for in 1803 he published, under the pseudonym of "Thomas Little," a small volume of poems. Of the work, as a whole, it is impossible to speak without censure and sorrow. While many of his compositions charm us by that easy grace and simplicity which Moore from the very first laboured to attain, as well as by the felicity of metaphor and play of fancy for which he was afterwards unrivalled, there are some which never should have been written, or if written, never should have been published. Even at the time he offered a sort of excuse or extenuation for these juvenilia, which he called by the mild name of "inoffensive follies," but which his maturer judgment led him to regret and suppress in a later edition. The kindness of Lord Moira now procured for the young poet a post, which one might well believe would be little suitable to his habits or tastes-a post of business-that of registrar to the Court of Admiralty at Bermuda. But Moore thought differently, at least at the time. "If I did not make a shilling by it," he writes to his mother. "the new

character it gives to my pursuits, the claim it affords me upon government, the absence I shall have from all the frippery follies that would hang upon my career for ever in this country-all these are objects invaluable of themselves." Thorough selfdeception! Absence from what had become the very sustenance of his life, the only atmosphere in which his intellect and spirit could thrive-the society of the brilliant, the witty, the elegant, the exalted-he was to learn, would be intolerable. From his letters home, which seem ever the true exponents of his feelings, we easily discover how his mind was always recurring to England. Though feeling, with all a poet's delight, the natural beauties of the scenes in which he was placed, casual expressions betray the longings of his heart, and his disappointment that "a few miserable negroes is all the bloomy flush of life" to be found where he looks for "nymphs and graces;" while more than once he speaks of being "reconciled to the step" he had taken. So after a few months he handed over business to a deputy, and set off to ramble through the mainland of America, where he was sadly disappointed; and in November, 1804, finds himself in Plymouth, "almost crying with joy to be able once more to write on English ground." Yet though Bermuda had little to satisfy the man of civilization, and America was thoroughly distasteful to him who was already in his tastes an aristocrat, the fourteen months' wanderings

"O'er lake and marsh, through fevers and through fogs,

'Midst bears and Yankees, democrats and frogs,"

were not without poetic fruits. The impressions received, both from external nature and from the state of society, were recorded in epistles to friends, and in occasional poems. These he published in 1806, dedicating the volume to his friend Lord Moira. Apart from the beauty of many of these compositions, they are valuable for their correctness of description; pictures painted with all the glow and flush of a colouring which is yet no exaggeration-the poetry of scenery limned by the poetry of language. It so happened that in this volume Moore reproduced the Poems of "Thomas Little," thus avowing an authorship which, indeed, nobody doubted An attack, unsparing in its severity, from the pen of Jeffrey appeared in the Edinburgh Review of July, 1806. Unjustifiable alike in its exaggeration of the faults and its depreciation of the merits of the work, which he pronounced "a public nuisance," and whose author ne says 66 may boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious of moder versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, have devoted their talent to the propagation of immorality," in which he "labours with a perseverance at once udicrous and detestable." From this literary attack important results followed-a hostile meeting and a lasting friendship. The particulars of the famous rencontre of reviewer and reviewed, have been preserved by both parties, and as we read it -day we feel that neither, from the commencement, was very heartily homicidal in is feelings. A sense of duty (we smile in this year of 1866 at such a misuse of the Ford), somewhat tardily arrived at by the Irish bard, induced him to write a cartel to bis Scotch reviewer, which admitted of but one answer; and they met one fine morning on the hallowed spot consecrated to such honourable affairs, Chalk Farm. In Moore's account, as he looked back upon the scene through the softening medium of time, there runs an under current of quiet humour, that shows he felt what a silly thing this playing at pistols really was. While blundering seconds were fumbling

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with the weapons behind the trees, the inexperienced and amicable principals were left together. "What a beautiful morning it is!' said Jeffrey. 'Yes,' I answered with a slight smile, 'a morning made for better purposes,' to which his only response was a sort of assenting sigh. As our assistants were not, any more than ourselves, very expert at warlike matters, they were rather slow in their proceedings, and as Jeffrey and I walked up and down together, we came once in sight of their operations; upon which I related to him, as rather apropos to the purpose, what Billy Egan the Irish barrister once said, when, as he was sauntering about in like manner while the pistols were loading, his antagonist, a fiery little fellow, called out to him to stand his ground—‘Don't make yourself unaisy, my dear fellow,' said Egan; 'sure, isn't it bad enough to take the dose without being by at the mixing up?"" Shade of Shakspeare! that thou hadst but known of such a gentle war-passage. Then should we have had Touchstone, or some of thy wise fools, instructing us in the seven causes of reconcilement, when he "did dislike the cut" of a certain writer's pen. Here we have Jeffrey's remark "Courteous" on the weather; then Moore's "Quip" subrident, next Jeffrey's "Reply" suspirant, followed by Moore's "Reproof" jocular. Ah! if the seconds had not come up, the principals would soon have settled the affair in their own way, they would "have shook hands and swore brothers." But the seconds did come up, the deadly weapons are raised, when the policemen spring from behind the hedge conveniently close, knock Jeffrey's pistol out of his hand, seize that of Moore, and take the parties all to Bow Street. In "the lock up" Jeffrey was brilliant, Moore was captivated, all thoughts of blood and murder were at an end; in fact, they fell in love with each other, and the farce was completed by binding them over to keep the peace. Ah! the peace had been cemented for ever, and a satisfactory explanation set all to rights. Ludicrous as the whole affair appeared in the eyes of Moore, who very appropriately subscribed himself "Tom Fool" in recounting it to Miss Godfrey, it was made more ludicrous to the public by the fact that Jeffrey's pistol when examined at Bow Street was found to be without a bullet (it had doubtless fallen out when the weapon was knocked out of his hand by the policeman), and the public press made itself exceedingly merry on the occasion. But it led in a few years after to another misprision of duello, which was also to lead to like bloodless and happy results. It happened that the following year a rather dissipated young nobleman, still in his teens, and little conscious of the latent power slumbering within him, published a volume of poems called "Hours of Idleness." "The Edinburgh" fell as savagely on the peer as it had fallen on the commoner; but the former took a more appropriate mode of retaliation, and returned his adversary's fire with "pellets of the brain," instead of bullets of lead. The pride of Byron was wounded, and indignation roused up all the gallantry of his nature and the smouldering fires of his genius, and stimulated into rapid development the seeds of poetry. In the "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," in 1809, Byron assailed Jeffrey, whom he mistakenly believed to be the author of the review, and the affair at Chalk Farm did not escape his satire. Some pungent lines upon the "leadless pistol" appeared in the poem, and an unjustifiable note to the text stated that neither pistol was loaded. The Hibernian blood of Moore could ill brook this revival of an old charge proved to be false (indeed, his honour and gallantry in the affair were undoubted); and he wrote to Byron a letter, which was but a prelude to another duel. Byron had, however, left England, and ere his return

Moore's feelings of irritation had greatly diminished, and his marriage made him the less anxious that the matter should proceed to extremities. A correspondence ensued, which terminated in a generous and cordial letter from the peer. The good offices of friends intervened, and at a dinner at Rogers' the two poets met for the first time to become friends during their joint lives, each respecting the abilities of the other, till the survivor became the biographer of the noble author. Moore in his Life of Byron has left us an ample and very candid account of the entire affair, which while it detracts nothing from his courage, speaks favourably for the accession of common sense which years and changed condition had brought him. To return from this digression, the Whigs went out of office, and with them his friend and patron Lord Moira; and he was at once active with his pen in the ranks of the opposition. Out came in 1808 two satirical poems, at first anonymously, "Corruption" and "Intolerance," and "the Sceptic" the year following. These, however, as he says himself, never attained much success, nor even reached a second edition. The cause is probably to be found in their severe didactic style, more suited for Juvenal, Johnson, or Gifford, than for the sprightly lyrist; and yet they are not without merit, and full of terse and pointed writing. He had the sagacity soon to discover he was not fit to carry heavy arms, and betook himself to that lighter form of weapon, "not only more easy to wield, but from its very lightness perhaps more sure to reach the mark." Few men ever wielded that weapon more adroitly, few sent the shaft more unerringly home to the mark, than did Moore, in the numerous squibs shot from his inexhaustible quiver—– arrows tipped with satire the brightest, the keenest, winged with feathers of the swan of song. 66 Right and left the arrows fly," striking now the royal prince, now a minister. But after all there was no poison in the barb to rankle in the wound it made. "We do not believe," said a Tory writer in aftertimes, "that any one was ever hurt by libels so witty as those of Mr. Moore." Great privilege of wit, which renders it impossible even for those whose enemies wits are to hate them! And so it was that many of those who smarted from the wound soon recovered their good humour and joined in the laugh, and none with more zest that the Prince of Wales, who came in for his full share of gatire. We may as well here dispose of an accusation rife at the time, and often repeated-the ingratitude of Moore in assailing his royal patron. Moore's obligations to the prince were few and trifling-the dedication of Anacreon to him, by which the poet conferred a greater honour than the prince; a place once or twice at a table where, like other wits, he was asked for his wit, and contributed what wealth could not purchase, and paid for his dinner in coin minted in the poet's brain; and now and then a few of those free and easy conversational condescensions, which one knew better how to dispense with liberality (for he knew how valueless they were) than the worst of all the Georges. Amongst the productions of this description are to be classed, "The Twopenny Post Bag," and those various political, satirical, and bamorous compositions which spread over many years.

During all this time Moore had been enjoying himself and giving enjoyment in those circles where his genial, joyous temperament found its true home-now visiting Ireland, taking part in private theatricals; now at Donington; now with the Donegalls; and still, during all these distractions, aiming at and meditating higher and better things than the frivolities of fashionable life. So far back as 1807, he had entered upon the path which was to lead him to that fame which was to be the most