none of it. "The fact is," he says, "it is my name brings these offers; and my name would suffer by accepting them." It is with difficulty he was induced to accept (and he limited his acceptance to one year) Captain Marryat's munificent offer of 500l. a year for contributions to the Metropolitan just so often as it might suit him to give them, stipulating only for something in each of the three next numbers. Though writing was purely a profession to him, he never at any time grasped at gain, or balanced between large profits and a high and unblemished reputation. He had always, moreover, a pleasure in executing his work well, and a very conscientious anxiety to justify confidence reposed in his powers.

On the occasion of his father's death, in December 1825, he was again called on to exercise his self-denying independence.

'Forgot to say that, the night before last, I received a letter from Crampton, enclosing one from Shaw (the Lord-Lieutenant's secretary), the purport of which was that the Lord-Lieutenant meant to continue my father's half-pay in the shape of a pension to my sister. Resolved, of course, to decline this favour; but wrote a letter full of thankfulness to Crampton. Find since that this was done at Crampton's suggestion; that Lord Wellesley spoke of the difficulty there was in the way, from the feelings the king most naturally entertained towards me, and from himself being the personal friend of the king; but that, on further consideration, he saw he could do it without any reference to the other side of the Channel, and out of the pension-fund placed at his disposal as Lord-Lieutenant. All this is very kind and liberal of Lord Wellesley, and God knows how useful such an aid would have been to me, as God alone knows how I am to support all the burdens now heaped upon me; but I could not accept such a favour. It would be like that lasso with which they catch wild animals in South America; the noose would be only on the tip of the horn, it is true; but it would do."

This was a real sacrifice; for, in consequence partly of the assistance rendered by him to his mother and sister, he seems during this year to have been in considerable difficulties about money-matters. It is characteristic of the value of his name, and the confidence reposed in him, that it was always casy for him to obtain money on a mortgage of his future abilities; both the Times and the Chronicle were willing to make him an advance, to be written out in squibs, and the proprietors of Covent Garden lent him 4007., on the conditions that he should write them a play within twelve months or return the money with interest. He preferred the latter alternative, and provided funds chiefly by writing jeux-d'esprit for the Times, whose proprietors advanced him 500l., and offered him 400l. a-year for sending them just so many of these poems as his fancy and inclination might prompt him to write. At the same time he was busy with his

prose story of The Epicurean, and negotiating with Murray about a life of Lord Byron. Murray is very difficult to deal with, and does not know his own mind about the matter; at one time he engages Moore to write the life, at another determines to publish Byron's papers by themselves; then decides they are private and cannot be published in his lifetime, and must be left as a legacy to his children; and ultimately hands them all over to Moore, and gives him 4000 guineas to make the most of them. In all his dealings with Moore Mr. Murray fully justifies an expression of Byron's, who called him "the most nervous of God's booksellers." He repeatedly urged to Moore that Byron's life was "his birthright." It must be a very well-established publisher who can get it into his head that he was born with a vested interest in the history of another man's life. The Longmans' mode of dealing stands in remarkable contrast to Mr. Murray's constant anxiety to secure a good pennyworth. All their transactions with Moore, from the very beginning down to this present time,-when they have given, as Lord John informs us, 3 001. for the diary edited by him,-seem to have been mark by a liberality amounting to generosity, and a most friendly and delicate consideration for Moore's interests. Moore ought scarcely to have written his witty little poem describing the publishers dining off the authors; he himself certainly ate his full share of the dish made out of his brains. The lions of Paternoster Row don't make the statues; perhaps, however, they like as well to keep quiet about it, and prefer to "praise God, and make no boast."

In June 1827 The Epicurean was published. It had considerable success, though not so much as his poems. The research he expended on this work is something wonderful; and there is no doubt that all the particulars of his description are strictly in accordance with what somebody else has said some time ago: the longer ago the better. This does not mean that he has seized the spirit of the time, or reproduced the life and thought of Christian and Heathen Egypt in the second century; only that he rummaged an immense number of books to pick up any thing he could find to serve as materials for his fancy to work upon. The only thing he really wished to be correct in was external scenery and costume; as for the rest, there is nothing in Alciphron to prevent his being a sentimental modern man of fashion. Alethe would have found her place at least as well in a Puseyite convent as in the Pyramids; and the two had fled with as much propriety to Scotland as up the Nile. The story hangs on the slightest possible thread of incident; the dramatis persona have no lifelikeness or substantive character about them; but the whole owes its charm to the gorgeous tints spread over the externals;

D

the fancy is perpetually employed in reconstructing for us scenes of splendour and startling novelty. The broad Nile glitters in the sun, starred with the green islands; boats flit here and there, the stately temples are laid open, lamps shine, music echoes in our ears, dancing forms, lovely faces bewilder our eyes; we think we are at the opera-house, and the ballet is divine. Never was a spectacle got up with more skill or with a more lavish expenditure of materials. Alethe and Alciphron in a pas-de-deux, emblematic of the power of love and the Christian religion, display a grace and tenderness that moves the hearts of all spectators. There is enjoyment of a certain sort in reading of this kind, something like that we have in seeing good fireworks; but as inferior to the pleasure real poetry gives as fireworks are

"To sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,

Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine."

In our first youth, indeed, when the imagination is awakening, and the intellect and the feelings at once keenly alive and undisciplined and uninformed by realities, this sort of stimulant to the fancy seems delightful; we devour it with absorbing interest, the artificiality does not spoil the sentiment, we don't see the poverty that all this glitter enwraps. At that age we don't care about our heroes and heroines being true to the complex realities of human beings; enough for us if the women are incarnations of loveliness, and the men paragons in courage and intellect. Moore's is the vin mousseux of poetry; adolescents and some women drink it with pleasure; men prefer something with more body and real flavour.

In 1830 he published his Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, which was another work not altogether palatable to Holland House; but about this Moore does not very much concern himself; he has begun to doubt whether the Whigs are much better than their opponents. He thinks they have as much party spirit, and are less able to bear the elation of place. He has a private pique, too, against them. In England, when any person high in rank or power shows personal kindness to a literary man, such kindness is looked on less as a favour in itself than as the foundation for a claim to receive an official appointment. It is unfortunate; but so it is, however; and even Moore, with all his independence of feeling, does not escape the universal impression that, because he has been hospitably treated, something ought to be "done for him." He is disappointed that Lord Lansdowne does not think of him; and this temper of his breaks out in some very caustic observations on the Whig tendencies to conciliate opponents rather than reward friends.

On the question of Reform, too, Moore differed from the

Whigs. He said that he agreed with the Whigs as to the principle of the measure, and with the Tories in their opinion as to its consequences. Lord John, of course, inserts a note containing a list of measures which his party are accustomed to take the credit of, and holding up to admiration "the wisdom and patriotism of our reformed Parliaments." Moore was certainly wrong as to the calmness with which the country would receive and work the new measure; he and the Tories were not wrong as to the necessary development of the false principle of simple numerical representation, for the adoption of which the short-sighted and unskilful concoctors of the bill itself are responsible. But, except so far as Ireland was concerned, Moore did not take any very deep interest in politics; he discussed them as one living familiarly with some of the chief actors could not help doing, but he did not venture into the arena. He seems, indeed, at one time, to have had thoughts of taking an active part in the Irish questions of the day; but was deterred, partly by the overshadowing influence of O'Connell, whose whole course, in spite of some personal regard, he always regarded with aversion and disapprobation, and partly because he was prevented by the exigencies of earning a livelihood.

He had a real affection for his country, and took, in general, temperate and sensible views of her political position and requirements. His patriotic songs had done much to excite sympathy for her cause, and won him a very high place in the warm hearts of his countrymen, from which even his courageous attack on O'Connell in one of his songs did not displace him. On the occasion of his visit to Ireland in the years 1830 and 1835, he was welcomed with the most unbounded enthusiasm. "Show your Irish face, Tom," they cried at the theatre, "you needn't be ashamed of it," and welcomed it when it appeared with storms of acclamation.

His Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion, which he produced about this time, is written more under an Irish inspiration than a Catholic one. It is a defence of the Catholic religion, hedging the controversy between it and Protestantism within very narrow limits, and conducting it within these limits on a very narrow basis. There are two ways of arguing all questions: one is, to attempt to grasp in its fulness the real case of your adversary, to pierce to the real ground on which he supports his convictions, to find the elements of truth which are embraced in it, and to follow the edge of that delicate boundary along which it melts into error,-this is the mode which a powerful mind, with strong convictions of its own, and a desire to convince minds of another class, will naturally pursue. The

other course is, to direct exclusive attention to what seem the weakest points of an adversary's case; to batter away at these; to strip away the finer suggestions of words, and insist on holding them to their naked grammatical meaning, uninfluenced by the tone of the connection and the character of the writer's mind; to snatch at small advantages; to appeal to the prejudices of your own party instead of the candour of the other; in short, to harass the suburbs, instead of compelling a surrender by parallels and regular approaches. The Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion is an instance of the latter mode of argument. It is a laborious array of what the writer thinks the weak points of Protestantism, among which the facts that Luther drank beer and thought he saw the devil hold a prominent place. It is an array of citations to show that the early Fathers believed in the Real Presence; an attempt to impugn the principle of private judgment by enumerating the various sects into which Protestantism has branched; and by setting up the results of German investigation as a bugbear to frighten us from an open perusal of the Bible. It is curious how easily Moore adapts himself to the close air of the Catholic Church. The book is weak, nay, often destructive to the cause he advocates; for he uses the argument of the moment, without any regard to its ultimate tendencies. Dr. Doyle perceived this when he said, in praising the book, that "if St. Augustine were made less heretical, and Scratchenback (the German professor) less plausible, the work is one of which any of us might be proud." It is not always safe to prove your proposition by a reductio ad theologiam Germanicam. Moore was annoyed that he should be identified with his hero; while at the same time he says he does firmly believe all that he has said in his book of the superiority of the Roman Catholic religion over the Protestant in point of antiquity, authority, and consistency. That is, he thought the early Fathers more Catholic than Protestant. Perhaps he perceived that this point might be granted without any very fatal consequences to the common principles of Protestant churches. He was not in his book arguing out his own convictions; he was only striking a blow, with an Irishman's natural irritation, at the Established Church in Ireland. Whatever faith he thought himself bound to profess and defend, his real conclusions as to the relative advantages of the two churches are evident enough from several expressions he lets fall. We may cite, in particular, one memorandum which occurs in his diary of a conversation with his sister after their father's death:

"Our conversation naturally turned upon religion; and my sister Kate, who, the last time I saw her, was more than half-inclined to de