enjoys it all with the zest of one-and-twenty. He is equal to his fortunes-he is vain of his success; but his is not that most offensive form of vanity, a stifled internal swelling with demure exterior, but he openly enjoys the triumphs he feels he deserves, and gaily boasts of them to his home circle, where he knows they will give pleasure:

"How d'ye do, my dearest mother? Did you see my name in the paper among the lists of company at most of the late routs? This is a foolish custom adopted here, of printing the names of the most distinguished personages that are at the great parties, and Mr. Moore, I assure you, is not forgotten. I have an idea of going down to Donington Park, to seclude myself for about a month in the library there : they are all in town, but Lord Moira tells me I may have an apartment there whenever I wish. 'Tis a long time since I heard from you. Are you all well and happy? Grierson has not left this yet. I dined yesterday with George Ogle, and he was there. I met the Prince at supper at Lady Harrington's, on Monday night; he is always very polite You cannot think how much my songs are liked here. Monk Lewis was 'in the greatest agonies' the other night at Lady Donegal's, at having come in after my songs: "Pon his honour, he had come for the express purpose of hearing me.' Write to me soon, dearest little mamma, and tell me you are well."

to me.

At the age of twenty-three he declines with scorn an offer of the Irish Laureateship, to be held on the same terms as the English one:

"My dearest mother,-Yesterday I received my good father's letter it was quite a cordial to me, and decided my conduct instantly. Never could I have had the faintest idea of accepting so paltry and degrading a stipend, if I had not the urging apprehension that my dears at home wanted it; but Heaven be praised that you are not in instant necessity for an assistance which necessity alone could reconcile. I will do better for you, at least as well, by means more grateful to my feelings. The manner in which Mr. Wickham communicated the circumstance to me would disgust any man with the least spirit of independence about him. I accordingly, yesterday, after the receipt of my father's letter, enclosed the Ode for the Birthday, at the same time resigning the situation, and I slept sounder last night in consequence, than, I assure you, I have done for some time. It would place me on a ladder indeed, but a ladder which has but the one rank, where I should stand stationary for ever. Feeble as my hopes are of advancement under government, I should be silly to resign them, without absolute necessity, for a gift which would authorise them to consider me provided for, and leave me without a chance of any other or further advantage: it would 'write me down an ass' and a poet for ever!"

This "authorise them to consider me provided for" is delightful from a young man whose claims on Government con

sisted in his having paraphrased Anacreon, published Little's Poems, and written a Candid Appeal to Public Confidence. Lord Moira, however, had led him to form hopes of "being provided for;" hopes which he seems to have unduly encouraged and ultimately not very gracefully disappointed. He made, indeed, his father barrack-master in Dublin, and at the end of 1803 he obtained for Moore himself the office of registrar in the Court of Admiralty in Bermuda. This appointment took him to the island, and on his return he made a short tour in America and Canada. Wherever he went he gathered new acquaintance and left regrets behind him. The gun-room officers of the Phaeton frigate, in which he went out, found him as pleasant and indispensable a companion as the fine ladies in London, and the first lieutenant repented of his first impression. "I thought you," said he, "the first day you came on board, the damndest conceited little fellow I ever saw, with your glass cocked up to your eye.”

As soon as he got home, he set to work to extract some profit at least from his journey, for he had found his appointment promised to be of very slight value; and early in 1806 he published a volume of miscellaneous poems, most of them founded on his Bermudan and American experiences. These poems contain little of any value. The Americans did not produce a favourable impression on their visitor. He shot a very penetrating glance into their defects: stigmatising their political vices as those not of an unripe but of an effete civilisation; and a portion of his book is occupied by some sharp satire on their less agreeable national characteristics, especially on the discrepancy between American praises of freedom and practice of slavery. The description of Bermudan scenery, and the poems to Nea, have had their warm admirers, perhaps have yet; but the love-poetry is of that scidlitzpowder kind which after it has effervesced in one generation is not often tasted in another. They seem to spring more from his own personal feeling, indeed, than most of his poems; but even in this case we learn from himself that the Nea of his adoration was a fancied compound of two real individuals. From Canada he brought the Canadian boat-song, which, as he long ago explained, is not what the Canadian boatmen sing.

As

It was Jeffrey's review of these "Odes and Epistles" in the Edinburgh that led to the famous rencontre between the poet and his critic, and furnished so much amusement to the town. Sir Robert Peel drew up and left behind him a vindication of his political conduct, so Mr. Moore has handed down to posterity an elaborate memorial on this important meeting, and proves satisfactorily that he really was in earnest, and that there were bonâ fide bullets and not paper pellets in the pistols. The hostile meeting was succeeded by a pacific one at Mr. Rogers's, where

the belligerents were reconciled, and became thenceforward fast friends. In 1808 he published two satires, Corruption and Intolerance; and in the next year another, the Sceptic, which he called a philosophical satire, though it has not much either of philosophy or satire in it. Fortunately, all these poems are short. They consist of declamatory matter, not undefaced, when he touches on Irish Catholic persecutions, with some traces of that sort of screaming vituperation common to Irish patriots and angry women; but which was not natural to Moore, and from which both his sense and taste in general kept him free.

On the other hand, there are in these satires couplets scarcely inferior to Pope in neatness and point; such as,

Or

"But bees, on flowers alighting, cease to hum;
So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb.'

"The smith of Ephesus thought Dian's shrine,
By which his craft must thrive, the most divine;
And even the true faith seems not half so true
When linked with one good living as with two.
Had Walcot first been pensioned by the throne,
Kings would have suffered by his praise alone;
And Paine, perhaps, for something snug per ann.,

Had laughed, like Wellesley, at all Rights of Man."

These productions fell dead. They were a mistake, and a very unaccountable one to be made by a man who had already touched the poetical pulse of the time. They were written in direct imitation of a past school; and any man who chooses to imitate his ancestors in his writings will have the mortification of finding that though he may write much better things than they did, his contemporaries will think the ancestral writing very fine, but not read his.

The Sceptic has an interest, as no doubt shadowing forth to some extent the attitude of his own mind in matters of theological belief. It describes in a superficial way some of the forms of human error, and concludes with some good lines inculcating a general suspense of opinion as the only wise attitude of mind:

"Hail, modest Ignorance, thou goal and prize,--
Thou last, best knowledge of the simple wise!
Hail, humble Doubt! when Error's waves are past,
How sweet to reach thy sheltered port at last;
And there, by changing skies nor lured nor awed,
Smile at the battling winds that roar abroad!

There gentle Charity, who knows how frail
The bark of Virtue, even in summer's gale,
Sits by the nightly fire, whose beacon glows
For all who wander, whether friends or foes.
There Faith retires, and keeps her white sail furl'd,
Till call'd to spread it for a better world;

While Patience, watching on the weedy shore,
And mutely waiting till the storm be o'er,
Oft turns to Hope, who still directs her eye
To some blue spot, just breaking in the sky.
Such are the mild, the blest associates given

To him who doubts,—and trusts in naught but Heaven!"

His scepticism, however, never extends to the fundamental axioms of faith. He speaks with some contempt of religious forms; but never of the substance of religion. He was subject to accesses of emotional piety, and seems always to have felt a religious trust in the Divine Providence, deepened by the sorrows of his later years. His attitude in matters of theological opinion is peculiar and characteristic. He liked to know about these things, and was well informed on them. He wrote an article on the Fathers in the Edinburgh Review: he published a vindication of the Roman Catholic religion. But he never cared to use his knowledge to make up his own opinions. He was born a Roman Catholic, and continued so till his death: partly from a principle of honour which made him feel it an unworthy thing to desert the religion of his parents and country; partly because he had no definite call to be any thing else. Truth of fact he was always solicitous about: truth of opinion never interested him the least. "I wish," he said, "men would oftener give us what they read than what they think." He had a lively, wellstrung intellect, a good memory, and a sound judgment as far as it went. He was very capable of forming right conclusions on matters either personal or political which came immediately before him and required no very comprehensive view; but of the investigatory mind he had no trace. As long as his watch went well, he was not a man to examine into its construction. His adhesion to the Roman Church was a very loose one. As early as at the age of eighteen he ceased to attend confession. "We are told," he says, "that such pain and humiliation are salutary to the mind, and I am not prepared to deny it, the practice of confession as a moral restraint having both sound arguments and high authority in its favour." It might be a very good thing, and it might not; for himself, he found it irksome, and let it alone. In a similar spirit he seems to have waved any practical compliance with the ceremonies and ordinances of his Church. He was not unwilling to be taken for a member of the Church of England. Lord Lansdowne, after being intimate with him for years, learns for the first time that he is a Catholic; and there is a passage in one of his prefaces in which, speaking of himself as the author of the Twopenny Postboy under the pseudonym of Mr. Brown, he seems desirous, to say the least of it, to gather all the credit of occasional conformity. "To the charge of being an

Irishman, poor Mr. Brown pleads guilty, and I believe it must also be acknowledged that he comes of a Roman Catholic family: an avowal which I am aware is decisive of his utter reprobation in the eyes of those exclusive patentees of Christianity, so worthy to have been the followers of a certain enlightened Bishop Donatus, who held that God is in Africa and not elsewhere.' But from all this it does not necessarily follow that Mr. Brown is a Papist, and, indeed, I have the strongest reasons for suspecting that they who say so are somewhat mistaken. Not that I presume to have ascertained his opinions upon such subjects. All I profess to know of his orthodoxy is, that he has a Protestant wife and two or three little Protestant children, and that he has been seen at church every Sunday for a whole year together, listening to the sermons of his truly reverend and amiable friend, Dr. ———————, and behaving there as well and as orderly as most people."

On another occasion he speaks in no very measured terms of Dublin politicians and the Roman Catholic faith: "If there is any thing in the world that I have been detesting and despising more than another for this long time past, it has been those very Dublin politicians whom you so fear I should associate with. I do not think a good cause was ever ruined by a more bigoted, brawling, and disgusting set of demagogues; and, though it be the religion of my fathers, I must say that much of this vile vulgar spirit is to be traced to that wretched faith, which is again polluting Europe with Jesuitism and inquisitions, and which of all the humbugs that have stultified mankind is the most narrow-minded and mischievous: so much for the danger of my joining Messrs. O'Connell, O'Donnell, &c."

From the period of his return from America to 1811 Moore continued sometimes in London, sometimes at Donnington (where Lord Moira provided him a place of country seclusion in the absence of the family), sometimes in Dublin, revolving sundry literary schemes, writing Irish melodies and songs, trying his hand at an opera, very busy under the stimulus of a failing exchequer, and very gay whether it is full or empty. His plan seems always to have been to get the money, and often to spend it, before he wrote the poem. Such an arrangement might have offered some temptations to undue procrastination or neglect to a man less scrupulously nice in fulfilling his engagements than Moore always showed himself. He has perfect confidence in his genius: it can and must yield him bread. "I hate to make a conscript of my Muse; but I cannot carry on the war without her, so to it she must go."

In March 1811 he married. His wife was a Miss Dyke, of whom we only learn that she came from Kilkenny, and