The author of Lalla Rookh, like most of the race of genius, is one
whom his own genius has ennobled. The man who has not to thank his
ancestors for what he enjoys of wealth, station, or reputation, has
all the more to thank himself for. The heralds, says Savage Landor,
will give you a grandfather if you want one, but a genuine poet has no
need of a grandfather; he is his own grandfather, his own
shield-bearer, and stands forth to the world in the proud attitude of
debtor to none but God and himself, the shield-bearer and the
grandfather of others. Thomas Moore was born in a humble house in
Dublin, the son of humble but respectable parents. He has made his own
way in the world, and given to those parents the honor of having
produced a distinguished son. That is as it should be. People should
honor their parents, it is rarely that parents can honor their
children. They can not bequeath their genius to them; it is not always
that they can succeed in engrafting on them their virtues; and if
parents be glorious in reputation and in goodness, if the children do
not walk worthy of that glory, the glory itself is only a blaze that
exposes them to the world; lights up and aggravates every blemish to
the general eye. How truly is honor, true honor, in nine cases out of
ten, a self-acquisition. Wealth you may entail, station you may
entail; but well won honor is a thing which, like salvation, every man
must achieve for himself. Poets in general know no ancestry. In their
poetic character they are as truly and newly created as Adam himself.
Who cares a button for the ancestors of Byron, of Milton, of
Shakspeare, of Goëthe, or of Schiller? These men start out to our eyes
in the blaze of their own genius, which darkens all around them. They
are creations of God, and not of man. They are sent forth into the
world, and not born into it. Their ancestors are not the ancestors of
their genius. They are the progenitors of the earthy caterpillar,--the
butterfly, the Psyche of genius, is born of itself. With the splendid
spirit which breaks forth sometimes from an old line, that line
commonly has nothing more to do than the earth on which we tread, the
common mother of us all, has to do with our soul and its celestial
powers. These come out of the hand of God, gifts to us and the world;
luminaries burning in a divine isolation; priests after the order of
Melchisedec, whose ancestry and whose posterity are not known. God has
vindicated to himself the origination of Genius and Christianity. They
both came into the world independent of governments and princes; they
spring out of the habitations of the poor, and walk among the poor:
they disdain to confer on worldly pride the honor of their alliance,
but they do their mission in the strength of their sender, and mount
to heaven.
These are great truths that every man of genius should see,
acknowledge, and act upon. His birth is higher than that of any
prince, even be it more lowly than that of the Son of God, in a stable
and a manger, with a stalled ox instead of the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and an ass instead of a prime minister, attending as
witnesses. Nobles can confer no nobility on him: he bears his patent
of honor in his own bosom; the escutcheon of genius in his broad and
exalted brow. He should remember this; and the world will not then
forget it. He should think of himself as sent forth by God, doing
God's work in the earth, and having to render up to God the account of
his embassy. With this idea within him and before him, his work will
be done the more nobly; and the public which is made what it is by
him,--effeminate through his effeminacy, corrupt through his
corruption, wise through his wisdom, will soon place him in his true
rank, above all heaps of metal and spadefuls of earth, and honor him
as the only true noble, the only man who has no need of heraldic lies
and fictitious grandfathers. These are great truths that the children
of men of genius too should bear in mind. They should feel that they
can not inherit genius, but they may possess it in some new shape, an
equal gift of heaven. This will keep alive in them the spirit of
honorable action; and they may come to live, not in the moonshine of
their ancestral lights, but in a genuine warm sunshine of their own.
The honor of a distinguished parent is not our honor but our foil, if
we do not seek to establish an alliance with it by our own exertion,
and above all, by goodness.
For want of poets and poets' children entertaining these rational
ideas, what miseries have from age to age awaited them! In the course
of my peregrinations to the birthplaces and the tombs of poets, how
often have these reflections been forced upon me. Humble, indeed, are
frequently their birthplaces; but what is far worse, how wretched are
often the places of their deaths! How many of them have died in the
squalid haunts of destitution, and even by their own hand. How many of
them have left their families to utter poverty; how many of those
caressed in their lives, lie without a stone or a word of remembrance
in their graves! Scott, with all his glory and his monuments in other
places, has not even a slab bearing his name laid upon his breast.
Chatterton's very bones have been dispersed to make a market.
Motherwell, amid all the proud cenotaphs in the Necropolis at Glasgow,
such men as Major Monteith having whole funeral palaces to themselves,
has not even a cubic foot of stone, or a mere post with his initials,
to mark his resting-place. But still more melancholy is the
contemplation of the beginning and the end of Robert Tannahill, the
popular song-writer of Paisley. Tannahill was no doubt stimulated by
the fame of Burns. True, he had not the genius of Burns, but genius he
had, and that is conspicuous in many of those songs which during his
lifetime were sung with enthusiasm by his countrymen. Tannahill was a
poor weaver at Paisley. The cottage where he lived is still to be
seen, a very ordinary weaver's cottage in an ordinary street; and the
place where he drowned himself may be seen too at the outside of the
town. This is one of the most dismal places in which a poet ever
terminated his career. Tannahill, like Burns, was fond of a jovial
hour amid his comrades in a public-house. But weaving of verse and
weaving of calico did not agree. The world applauded, but did not
patronize; poverty came like an armed man; and Tannahill in the frenzy
of despair resolved to terminate his existence. Outside of Paisley
there is a place where a small stream passes under a canal. To
facilitate this passage, a deep pit is sunk, and a channel for the
waters is made under the bottom of the canal. This pit is, I believe,
eighteen feet deep. It is built round with stone, which is rounded off
at its mouth, so that any one falling in can not by any possibility
get out, for there is nothing to lay hold of. Any one once in there
might grasp and grasp in vain for an edge to seize upon. He would sink
back and back till he was exhausted and sunk forever. No doubt
Tannahill in moments of gloomy observation had noted this. And at
midnight he came, stripped off his coat, laid down his hat, and took
the fatal plunge. No cry could reach human ear from that horrible
abyss; no effort of the strongest swimmer could avail to sustain him:
soon worn out he must go down, and amid the black, boiling torrent be
borne through the subterranean channel onward with the stream. Thus
died Robert Tannahill, and a more fearful termination was never put to
a poetical career. This place is called Tannahill's hole, and cats and
dogs drowned in it, from its peculiar fitness for inevitable drowning,
float about on the surface, and add to the revolting shudder which the
sight of it creates.
Such are some of the dominant tendencies of poetic fate which made
Wordsworth exclaim,
"We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness;"
and such must there be till genius respect itself, and cause the
public to respect it; till it reflect that it is a heavenly endowment,
and not a trade stock.
Among the more fortunate men of genius,--among those who by strength
of pinion, and by various resources of prose, poetry, and music, have
soared above the poet's ordinary path, beset with ropes, poison,
throat-cutting, razors, pistols, and drowning holes,--is the gay and
genial Thomas Moore. Moore was born, as I have said, in Dublin. His
father kept a shop in Aungier-street, and was a respectable grocer and
spirit dealer. The shop continues exactly as it was to the present
day, is employed for the same trade, and over it is the little
drawing-room in which Mr. Moore himself tells us, that he used to
compose his songs, and with his sister and some young friends, act
plays as a boy.
He was first educated by Mr. Samuel Whyte, to whom in his fourteenth
year he addressed a sonnet, which was published in a Dublin magazine,
called the Anthologia. This Mr. Whyte was fond of dramatic
representation, and is mentioned by Moore as having superintended
private theatricals at different gentlemen's and noblemen's houses, as
at the Duke of Leinster's, at Marly, the seat of the Latouches, etc.,
where he supplied prologues. Sheridan had been a pupil of Whyte's, and
it is further stated by Mr. Moore, that many parents were alarmed at
the danger of his instilling a love for these things into his
scholars. Can there be a doubt that he did so with Sheridan and Moore?
He was sent to the university in Dublin, where the unfortunate Robert
Emmet was at the time. Moore soon formed an acquaintance with him, and
became a member of a debating society, at which Emmet and other young
patriots assembled to prepare themselves for public life. On the
approach of the frightful explosion of 1798, the university was
visited by Lord Clare, its vice-chancellor, with a rigorous
examination, government having become aware of the students being
deeply engaged in the organization of the Irish union. Among those
found to be thus implicated, were Emmet, John Brown, and others. They
became marked men. Moore himself underwent examination, but came clear
off. From these connections and early impressions, however, we may
date his steady adherence to liberal and patriotic sentiments.
At the university his poetic genius early displaying itself, he soon
found his way over to England, where his wit, his songs, and his
conversational brilliancy, introduced him to the first circles of
fashionable life, and to government patronage. He was appointed to the
situation of Registrar to the Admiralty Court at the Bermudas. This
appointment turned out unfortunately for him, but it enabled him to
extend his knowledge of the world. He published on his return a
collection of odes, epistles, and fugitive poems, illustrative of the
scenery and life of that island; and he made a tour in the United
States, from which he indited a series of most caustic and satirical
epistles. From the hour that he settled down again in England,
notwithstanding the time which he must have devoted to society, into
which his peculiar powers of pleasing have continually drawn him, he
has displayed an extraordinary industry. The catalogue of his writings
from first to last is enormous. The Odes of Anacreon translated. A
Candid Appeal to Public Confidence, or Considerations on the dangers
of the Present Crisis, 1803. Corruption and Intolerance, two poems.
Epistles, Odes, and other Poems, 1806. Little's Poems, 1808. A Letter
to the Roman Catholics of Dublin, 1810. M.P., or the Blue Stocking; a
comic opera, in three acts, performed at the Lyceum, 1811. Intercepted
Letters, or the Twopenny Post Bag, by Thomas Browne the younger, 1812:
this has gone through upward of fourteen editions. Irish Melodies.
Arthur Murphy's Translation of Sallust completed. The Skeptic, a
philosophical Satire. Lalla Rookh, 1817. The Fudge Family in Paris,
1818. Ballads, Songs, etc. Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, in verse.
Trifles Reprinted, in verse. Loves of the Angels. Rhymes on the Road.
Miscellaneous Poems by Members of the Procurante Society. Fables for
the Holy Alliance. Ballads, Songs, Miscellaneous Poems, etc. Memoirs
of Captain Rock. Life of Sheridan. The Epicurean. Odes on Cash, Corn,
Catholics, etc. Evenings in Greece. Life and Letters of Lord Byron, in
17 vols. History of Ireland, etc., etc., etc.
If Mr. Moore has been a gay man, it can not be said that he has been
an indolent one. He was born in May, 1780, and is, consequently, now
only sixty-six. It would appear that, on coming to England, he
destined himself for the bar, as he entered himself of the Middle
Temple, in 1799. But instead of legal studies, poetical ones seem to
have occupied him in his chambers; for in the course of 1800, and
before he had completed his twentieth year, he published his
translation of the Odes of Anacreon. This seems to have decided his
fate for literature. In 1801 out came Little's Poems, many of which, I
am persuaded, the author would give a great portion of his fame to be
able to cancel forever; and, indeed, in his late edition, in one
volume, I am glad to see that the most exceptionable are excluded. In
1803 he set sail to take possession of his office in the West Indies;
on which occasion he was absent something more than a year. To pursue
a rapid outline of his life;--on his return to England he married a
Miss Dyke, said to be a lady of great personal beauty, most amiable
disposition, and accomplished manners. I believe she has always shown
herself a woman of much energy of character and tact of judgment, and
that the poet has found great cause to rely on her opinion in matters
of daily life. His great poem, Lalla Rookh, appeared in 1817; and in
the summer of that year Moore visited Paris, where he collected the
materials for that humorous production, The Fudge Family in Paris. In
the following year he made a visit to Ireland, where he was received
with the highest enthusiasm and public honor. In 1822 he again visited
Paris, where great respect was shown him by the French literati, and a
public dinner was given to him by the English nobility and gentry
resident there. In one of his prefaces to his different volumes,
which, in fact, contain his literary life, we learn, that he was
compelled to live in France at this time, in consequence of the
responsibilities under which he had fallen from the conduct of his
deputy in the Bermudas. He was, indeed, liable to demands of at least
six thousand pounds, and it was not safe for him to remain in England
till this matter was arranged; which was at length done by his
friends, and the sum reduced to one thousand; of which the deputy's
uncle paid three hundred. Two summers Moore states himself and family
to have lived in a cottage of some Spanish friends, near their seat.
La Butte Coaslin. He says that it conjured up an apparition of
Sloperton, which by a happy quotation from Pope he defines--
"A little cot with trees a row.
And, like his master, very low."
Here he used to wander in the noble park of St. Cloud, with his
pocket-book and pencil, composing verses, and pondering on the
Epicurean; and closing the evening by practicing duets with the lady
of his Spanish friend, or listening to her guitar. King, the dramatic
writer, lived near them, and Washington Irving visited him there. In
1823 he published The Loves of the Angels; and since then, beside the
Life of Sheridan, and various other productions, the Life and Letters
of Lord Byron.
Perhaps the most important event connected with his later life was the
destruction of the Memoirs of Lord Byron, which had been intrusted to
him for publication after his death. These Memoirs had been given to
Mr. Moore, and Mr. Moore had sold the copyright of them to Mr. Murray,
for two thousand guineas. Lord Byron being dead, and the time for
publication come, the relatives of Lord Byron took alarm, and implored
Mr. Moore to allow them to be destroyed. To this Mr. Moore was weak
enough to consent. That he did so from a sense of the most delicate
honor, there could be no question; even had he not proved that by the
sacrifice of two thousand guineas and interest, which he repaid to Mr.
Murray, though he had to borrow it of Messrs. Longman. But if honor to
Lord Byron's relatives was preserved, it was neither so to Lord Byron
nor the public. It was a sacred trust of the one for the gratification
of the other, and had Mr. Moore had any scruples on the subject of
publication, he should have returned the MS. to Lord Byron while
living. When dead, there was no such way out; there was no
alternative, without a betrayal of the most sacred trust that could be
reposed in man, but to allow the noble donor's intention to be
faithfully carried out. There has been much controversy on this topic,
but this still continues, and will continue to be, the result of
public opinion.
One of the secrets of Mr. Moore's successful industry, perhaps, may be
found in the fact of his having, spite of his social disposition, and
of all the fascinations of society for a man of his fame, wit, and
accomplishments, lived the greater part of his life since his marriage
in the country. Among the various places of his abode, two only have
been residences of much duration. These are Mayfield cottage, near
Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, and Sloperton cottage, near Devizes, in
Wiltshire.
At Mayfield he lived several years, and here he wrote Lalla Rookh.
This village is not particularly picturesque, nor is the immediate
neighborhood striking; but it lies in a fine country, and within a
short distance of it are Dovedale, and other beautiful scenes in
Derbyshire and Staffordshire. The recommendations of Mayfield have
been thus enumerated by a cotemporary writer in a periodical. "Moore's
cottage is in a secluded part of Mayfield, a village on the
Staffordshire side of the river Dove, about two miles from Ashbourne.
It is a spot not often alluded to in literature, though the
neighborhood has been peculiarly honored by literary men. Three miles
from Mayfield is Wootton-hall, where Rousseau lived several years;
where he botanized, and where he wrote his Confessions. One mile from
Mayfield, on the other side of the Dove, lived a great, and perhaps, a
much better man than Rousseau, but who will not attain an equal
renown--Michael Thomas Sadler. At Oakover, one mile from Mayfield, is
the residence of the late Mr. Ward, author of Tremaine. Two miles
farther up the river, in the loveliest of all villages, a grotto is
still preserved in which Congreve wrote his first drama. A ten
minutes' walk affords a view of the grand entrance to Dovedale,
immortalized by old Izaak Walton. At Tissington, another most
exquisite village, like the former without work-house or ale-house,
lived Greaves, the author of the Spiritual Quixote. Dr. Taylor, one of
Dr. Johnson's most esteemed friends, was an inhabitant of Ashbourne.
The great lexicographer was a visitor of this neighborhood, and some
of his most amusing conversations and peculiarities are recorded by
Boswell while staying in this quiet town. Mayfield cottage bears now
some claim to the notice of the lovers of literature, from its being
the residence of Mr. Alfred Butler, the clever author of the novels of
Elphinstone and The Herberts."
It was not, however, the attractions enumerated in the above passage
which determined the settlement of Moore there. His wife and himself
were traveling along from a scene of great aristocratic splendor, of
which they had become so weary, that they sighed for the utmost
simplicity, retirement, and repose, and vowed that they would take the
very first place of such a character that they found vacant. Mayfield
cottage was the one. "It was a poor place," said Moore to myself,
"little better than a barn, but we at once took it, and set about
making it habitable."
It is no doubt from some such remark on the part of the poet that a
paragraph originated which I have lately seen going the round of the
newspapers, that he wrote Lalla Rookh in a barn. That barn was, in
fact, Mayfield cottage. The right-hand front window is pointed out as
belonging to Moore's little parlor; the window at the side belonged to
his not very extensive library, and the trees visible above the roof
are part of the orchard, his favorite study, in which some of his
choicest lyrics were composed.
The warm-hearted poet, though it is many years since he quitted
Mayfield, speaks with pleasure of the enjoyment he experienced there.
The country around, both in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, has many
charms for a poetic eye. There are, too, many persons of taste and
intelligence living in it, from whom he and his family received every
cordial attention. He was zealously engaged in working out what he
deemed was to be the crowning work of his fame, Lalla Rookh, and he
regarded the cottage at Mayfield, and the scene immediately
surrounding it, peculiarly favorable for this purpose. "It was
indeed," he observes, in the preface to his eighth volume, "to the
secluded life I led during the years 1813-1816, in a lone cottage in
the fields of Derbyshire, that I owed the inspiration, whatever may
have been its value, of some of the best and most popular portions of
Lalla Rookh. It was amid the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters
that I found myself enabled, by that concentration of thought which
retirement alone gives, to call up around me some of the sunniest of
those Eastern scenes which have since been welcomed in India itself as
almost native to its clime." It is, he says, a peculiarity of his
imagination that it is easily broken in upon and diverted by striking
external objects. "I am," said he to me, "at once very imaginative,
and very matter-of-fact. The matter-of-fact can at any moment put to
flight all the operations of the imagination. It was, therefore,
necessary for me to exclude matter-of-fact, and all very striking or
attractive objects, and to concenter all my imagination on the objects
I wished to portray. My story lay in the East, and I must imbue and
saturate my imagination entirely with Eastern ideas, and Eastern
imagery. I must create, and place, and keep before me a peculiar
world, with all its people and characteristics. No place could be more
favorable for this than Mayfield, because it had nothing prominent or
seducing enough to rush through and force itself into the world which
I had evoked, created, and was walking and working in. The result was
most complete. Never having been into the East myself, yet every one
who _has_ been there declares that nothing can be more perfect
than my representations of it, its people, and life, in Lalla Rookh."
But though living in the country, Moore was always in the pretty
regular habit of visiting town during the season. Here he was the
charm of the circles of the Whig nobility, especially at Lansdowne and
Holland houses. At these places, and especially the latter, he met all
the distinguished men of the time. Byron, Jeffrey, Sidney Smith,
Campbell, Brougham, and the like. Even in the country he has lived
much at times in the houses of his great friends. In particular he
records his visit at Chatsworth, and at Donnington-park, the seat of
Lord Moira, where he describes himself as passing whole weeks in the
library there, even when the family was absent, "indulging in all the
freest airy castle-building of authorship." Here he met, oddly enough,
with the rival princes of France, poor Charles X. and his brother, the
Duc de Montpensier, and the Comte Beaujolais, at the same time with
the Duke of Orleans, the present Louis Philippe, who in the library at
the same house would be deep in a volume of Clarendon, "unconsciously
preparing himself by such studies for the high and arduous destiny
which not only the good genius of France, but his own sagacious and
intrepid spirit had early marked out for him." Rogers and Moore have
been for many years very intimate friends, and of course Moore has for
years been much at home in the classic abode of the latter poet.
During Byron's residence in Italy, Moore visited him there, and
received the unlucky gift of the Memoirs, out of which, and his two
thousand guineas, he was so shamefully wheedled by those who could so
very well afford to pay the price of that burnt offering, to him a
serious sacrifice.
But Lord Lansdowne was anxious to get the wit and poet down into his
own neighborhood, and pressed him to come and live near Bowood.
"Tommy, who dearly loves a lord," was the designation given to Moore
by his _dear_ friend, LORD Byron. As he obliged the relatives of
Byron by burning the horror-creating Memoirs, so he was willing to
oblige Lord Lansdowne by living near him. His lordship sent him word
that there was a house just the thing for him, at Bromham, not far
from Bowood. Moore went to it, but found it far too large and
expensive for a poet's income. He, however, told Mrs. Moore on his
return that he had seen a cottage on the road that was every thing
that _he_ desired, with a most delicious garden, and in a sweet
situation. With her usual energy, Mrs. Moore at once took coach,
hastened to the cottage, liked it as well as her husband did, and took
it at once. This was Sloperton cottage, and here they have resided
nearly thirty years.
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
White-house-vale, proudly overlooking Devizes. This hill, my driver
gravely assured me, was Roundaway hill, _where King John signed the
charter_! Behind the cottage, across some rich fields, are the
wooded slopes of Spy-park, once the property of Sir Andrew Baynton.
At a few hundred yards' distance, on the left-hand side of the lane as
you advance from the Devizes road, there stands the old manor-house of
Nonsuch, which has gone through many hands, and has, I believe, lately
been sold, and is now refitting for a modern mansion. A narrow
foot-lane descends past its grounds down through the valley, between
tall hedges and embowering alders, to the village of Bromham, which
gives you a view of the ancient knolls of the parklike environs of
Nonsuch. Old sturdy oaks are standing here and there on these knolls,
and every thing presents an air of great antiquity. A footpath runs
through these grounds, by which you are admitted to loiter at your
leisure amid the retired slopes and woodland hollows of this old
English scenery. The footway which, I have said, leads also down past
it, to Bromham, is peculiarly rural. It is paved, as the bottom
abounds in water, where a beautiful spring gushes up from the foot of
the ascent toward the village; and in passing along it, you feel
yourself to be shrouded amid a luxuriant growth of water-loving trees,
and surrounded by the quietness of woodland banks, and rustic farm
lands. The village is purely agricultural, and has a fine church, with
a singularly richly ornamented battlement.
Such is the immediate situation of Moore's cottage. Views of it every
one has seen; but it is only when you stand actually before it, see it
covered with clematis, its two porches hung with roses, and the lawn
and garden which surround it kept in the most exquisite order, and
fragrant with every flower of the season, that you are fully sensible
of what a genuine poet's nest it is.
The house was originally quite a common cottage. This part forms still
the end next to the Devizes road, which road, however, is three
quarters of a mile distant; but fresh erections have been added, so
that now it is not a very large, but a very goodly and commodious
dwelling. The old entrance has been left, as well as a new one made in
the new part, so that no unnecessary interruption may be occasioned to
the family by visitors. The old entrance leads to the little
drawing-room, the newer one to the family sitting-room. The poet's
study is up stairs. In the garden there is a raised walk running its
whole length, bounded by a hedge of laurel. This gives you the view
over the fields of Spy-park, and its finely wooded slopes. This is a
favorite walk of the poet; and it was, indeed, the fascination of this
garden which originally took his fancy, and occasioned him to think of
securing it.
At present Thomas Moore is suffering one of the afflictions to which
all men are liable, but which press, perhaps, most sensibly on the
poetic temperament--the loss of a son, an officer in foreign service.
What is worthy of remark, and is an evidence of his independent and
unselfish disposition, is that, I believe, with the exception of his
Bermuda appointment, which turned out a loss, through the dishonesty
of an agent, he has never received any other appointment, or any
pension, though he has been so thoroughly identified with, and
caressed by the Whigs. He can say, and does say, with a just
pride,--What I am, I have made myself--what I have, I have won by my
own hand. He has been careful to tell us himself, in his preface to
his third volume, the actual amount of _royal_ patronage which he
had been said to have received, and unworthily repaid, by quizzing the
modern Heliogabalus. It is this, and is worth reading: "Luckily, the
list of benefits showered upon me from that high quarter may be
dispatched in a few sentences. At the request of the Earl of Moira,
one of my earliest and best friends, his royal highness graciously
permitted me to dedicate to him my Translation of the Odes of
Anacreon. I was twice, I think, admitted to the honor of dining at
Carlton-house; and when the prince, on his being made regent, in 1811,
gave his memorable fête, I was one of the envied--about fifteen
hundred, I believe, in number--who enjoyed the privilege of being his
guests on the occasion." The obligation was certainly not
overpowering, especially when the country had to pay for it. Moore
adds, that history has now pretty well settled the character of this
royal patron. The obligation to nobility is not much more onerous.
This, to the poet himself, is highly honorable; but to the party, and
the noblemen of that party--the Lansdownes, Hollands, and
Russells--what is it? The cause of these men the warm and patriotic
pen of the Irish poet has essentially served. His wit, in songs and
squibs in the morning papers, and through various vehicles, has been
to them a sharp and glittering cimiter, lopping off the heads of whole
hosts of heavy arguments and accusations. Around their tables he has
cast a radiance and a merriment that would else have been sought for
in vain. To them he has been a genuine and a daily benefactor. They
have had the honor of his countenance, while they probably thought
that they were gracing him with theirs. How posterity laughs at all
such aristocratic self-delusions! How it reduces things to their real
dimensions! What may be the ideas of Thomas Moore, on this subject, I
do not know. I speak merely according to the impressions which the
contemplation of his peculiar career leaves upon me; and these are,
that his aristocratic friends have had a very good friend in him, and
he a very indifferent one in them. While, on all occasions, they have
been filling their families and ordinary hangers-on with wealth, the
ablest man of their party has been rewarded with a shake of the hand
and invitations to dinners, because he was too proud to ask for any
thing better. If he has dearly loved a lord, it must be confessed that
it has been with a very disinterested affection. Lord Byron was the
most generous to him of his class; but Lord Byron's friends robbed him
of that solitary benefit. And so, at the age of sixty-six, the
champion of the Whigs, the poet of the loves, the merry wit, and the
pungent satirist, the friend of the richest men in England, still sits
at his desk, and works for honest bread. Long may he enjoy it!
[Illustration: The "Ranter" Preaching]