faults of which we stand self-convicted, yet hoped were hidden, strikes us as one of the most flagrant forms of scandal. Besides we do not know all about ourselves: more than any other we know; but we are not only the being we appear to ourselves, we are also in some sense what we appear to others; and though we should hardly be willing to exchange our self-knowledge for that of others, yet should

"The Gods the giftie gie us

To see ourselves as others see us,"

it would certainly add, however unpleasantly, to the gross amount of our information. Hence, when we read the life of a remarkable man, we wish to know not only what he chooses to divulge of what he knows of himself, or what he unconsciously reveals in his writings; we wish also to know what impression he produced on external observers. Moreover, if a biography is to be a work of art, we must have a biographer: the work must bear the stamp of a creating mind-the artist, as well as the subject of his art, must have a recognisable impress. Rembrandt looks out from the canvas on which he paints the portrait of some burgomaster, and it is the spirit of Claude that is infused through those serene Italian landscapes. Nothing but a daguerreotype can be a mere copy; and what a daguerreotype is to a landscape, are diaries and letters to a biography,—an image true only of certain features, necessarily distorted in others, and not a work of art. But we like to have a work of art. We enjoy a pleasure from our sympathy with the creative spirit it displays, and we enjoy the reflected light thrown on the biographer. What would Johnson's life be without the naïve idolatry of Boswell? It is the salt of the whole, and gives the point to half the anecdotes. Moore himself notes down a happy case in point: "Boswell mentions Johnson saying to him, one night when they were sleeping in the same room and conversing, 'If you don't stop talking, sir, I will get up and tie you to the bed-post.' I mention this (adds Boswell) to show the faculty he had of placing his adversary in a ridiculous position." What would the story be without the comment? What should we have learned of this same Samuel Johnson from his memoirs and correspondence? Fancy eight volumes of them. We should have had not a monument, but a sesquipedalian sarcophagus. Sometimes, indeed, the individuality of the historian is so prominent as to give the leading characteristic to his work, as when Carlyle uses history and biography as wax on which to stamp the image of his own mind, or Defoe ascribes his own marked traits of character alike to harlots, pirates, princes, quakers, and cavaliers. We are not urging that a biography is always better read

1

ing than a diary, only that it has a completeness the latter never can have. Even where a man writes his own life, as no doubt he may do, re-creates himself as it were, casts his own idea of himself into form,-such an image, though probably more exact, minute, and life-like than any other, will still be partial. As a man can never see his whole image in a glass, so he can never form a complete reflection of himself in his own mind. The external biographer meanwhile can walk round him; though he can never get quite close, he can gather up a thousand clues from the observation of others; fragmentary, and often, no doubt, delusive, yet still carrying with them on the whole, to a man of discrimination and imaginative insight, sufficient indicia of their truth or falsehood. From these and from his own experience,―for the biographer does not occupy the most favourable position for the exercise of his art unless he has himself been intimate with his subject,―a man of genius may form a more complete, and on the whole a more truthful, image of another than any man can give of himself.

As to letters, usually so much relied on, they are of all things the most fallacious indications of character, whether they be the letters to a man or the letters from him. We don't write to a man to tell him what we think of him; we would not for the world he should know,—we wish to be agreeable, especially to our best friends, who are the people with whose faults we are most familiar: on the other hand, when we write, it is not to betray ourselves; and even in the very frankest and most intimate self-revelations of friendship and love, we unconsciously, and even necessarily distort the proportions and soften the edges of our characters. A sphere of isolation is granted to, nay forced upon each one of us; to be known strikes us as fearful, yet to be unknown carries with it sometimes a feeling of loneliness still more terrible, and a harassing sense of a want of genuineness in our relations to others. And hence it is one of the profoundest consolations and most enduring sustainments which Religion brings to the perplexed spirits of men, that it assures them of the presence of One by whom they are known even as they are, through every ravelled thread and fine-spun filament of their complicated existences-makes them feel that they are embraced and comprehended; and though an insoluble problem to themselves and others, are not without an explanation, a purpose, and a place.

Moreover, the degree in which a man's writings image himself varies infinitely. Some men know themselves, others don't; some write themselves, others are of so chameleon-like a nature that they take a tinge of each person whom they address, and in writing to a man become for a moment like him-their very

handwriting will often bear traces from the letter they are answering. Different lives are not alike expressible; some men live in thought, some in action, some in feeling. Different men express different sides of their character, often not the predominant one. A reserved man of feeling tells you only what he is doing; a thoughtful man of action (like Dr. Arnold, for instance) tells you of what he is thinking. Some men are not themselves when they write their letters: they become a correspondent. Do Pope's letters tell us any thing about him? He was thinking of absolutely nothing in writing them but of what would make a well-turned epistle; it is like reading deal-boards to peruse them.

Lord John Russell has not chosen to take the trouble of writing his friend's life. He has not even chosen to do common justice to the materials in his hands. Without the loss of a single trait of character, however minute, they might have been compressed into readable limits, and made into an interesting and entertaining book, instead of being flung in a mass before us, encumbered with a thousand characterless details and endless repetitions. Moore kept this diary as memoranda for memoirs he intended to write: he did not think the world would be called on to read it at large. He must be a very great man indeed of whom we wish to know where he dined seven days in the week. Much of this sort of thing would have been well exchanged for some fuller evidence from Lord John himself as to the habits and character of a man with whom he was intimate for so many years. The editor, however, has preferred a less laborious course. He supplies a short preface, insisting on one or two characteristics made sufficiently obvious in the voluminous pages of the diary, quotes from the biographies of Scott and Byron one or two tributes to his genius, and furnishes us at very disproportionate length with his own views about Tasso. Having done thus much, he launches us without further guide into a sea of letters and diaries, and concludes the work with a few pages of postscript, which add nothing to our knowledge of the man. From these, and from the various hints with which contemporary literature abounds, those of a generation too late to have known him in his prime must form their idea of the life and character of Moore.

It is not a difficult character to estimate. It contains none of those strongly-marked contrasts which make Byron an enigma. It is the easier because it is always the same. Most men go

through more or less of a process of development in their passage through life, and are different at different stages. Some slowly change, and you can mark the process; others move per ltum, and you see only the two contrasted pictures. Shake

speare's Harry Prince of Wales transformed to Henry the Fifth is no more untrue to nature than Crabbe's Edward Shore, veering in slow gradation from a man of genius to an idiot. Wellington, playing in Committee with his "quiz," and in whose "vacant face" Luttrell read that he at least would never succeed,-who can trace by what changes he became the writer of the Peninsular despatches? Moore, however, never seems to have altered. We see him on his first introduction to the stage, a little, round-faced, buoyant, clever, and pleasantly self-conceited child, with a wonderful faculty of making himself welcome, a healthy zest for enjoyment, and true and tender affections; through life, till the seclusion of his last retreat shuts him from the world, he remains exactly the same, except that he grows larger and dresses differently.

From his mother he seems to have derived his gay, pleasureloving disposition, his passion for music, and his taste for social enjoyments. But she was also his sedulous instructress, and carefully studied every opportunity of forwarding his progress in knowledge and his advancement in the world. When she came home late, she would sometimes rouse him at one or two in the morning to hear him repeat his school-lessons; an untimely solicitude to which her son declares he cheerfully submitted. She made friends with his masters, and got them to teach him in the evenings; scraped together money for a pianoforte, and had him instructed in music; and seems to have pushed him forward in every way with a mixture of indulgence and stimulants exactly suited to his disposition.

It was at a grocer's shop in Dublin (on the 28th May 1779, according to his own account) that Tom Moore was born, and passed the first nineteen years of his life. His parents, though low in the social scale, were not vulgar. Of his father we hear little; but his letters are well-written sensible productions, and his son describes him as "one of Nature's gentlemen." He had, he tells us, a quiet searching humour, which he did not scruple to exercise on the priests of his own faith, to the mingled amusement and annoyance of his wife, who was a sincere and even superstitious Catholic. "I vow to God, Jack Moore," she would say, "I am ashamed of you." It was she who made the two little drawing-rooms and the adjoining closet the scene of those crowded and delightful little supper-parties, in the midst of whose genial social festivities her son was brought up; here he learnt to associate jollity and "the bowl," not with mere hard drinking and roaring of choruses in male society, but with those more refined and intellectual enjoyments from which he never disconnected them. The presence of women, of wit, and of kindly fellowship, went always to his idea of a feast; and the

association was no doubt founded in these experiences of his youth. Music was never wanting: Wesley Doyle and Joe Kelly sang their duets; his mother subscribed her share, singing in a 'soft, clear voice," "How sweet in the woodlands;" and Master Tom was wont to give with no small éclat Dibdin's songs and the duet with Norah in the "Poor Soldier." He was a precocious boy," an old little crab," as a rival Irish Cornelia once somewhat splenetically observed, but precocious only in the liveliness and quickness of his parts; he did not anticipate manhood, it may almost be questioned whether he ever reached it. He wanted always something of the grave sense of responsibility which manhood generally brings. But though many men are children all their lives, Tom Moore was something much rarer-all his life a well-bred little boy. When quite a child, he could sing a song or recite a poem so as to give real pleasure to his hearers; and no embarrassing modesty on the part of himself or his friends prevented his talents being displayed to the best advantage. At the age of eleven he was employed in some of the private theatricals, then much the rage, to recite an epilogue, and then first saw his name in print:-—"Epilogue: A Squeeze to St. Paul's: Master Moore." At the same age he wrote his first regular poem, quizzing the use of the quiz, a favourite toy of the day. Soon after we find him penning his epilogue for himself, and yet by no means affecting the gravity of precocious youth; but so enamoured of the part of Harlequin, that he would dream of good spirits presenting him with a genuine parti-coloured suit, and devoted himself to mastering the headforemost leap by sedulous practice over the rail of a tentbed. At the age of fourteen he wrote verses which were printed in the Anthologia Hibernica as "by Master Thomas Moore," and some of which unequivocally anticipate his style of songwriting, and are not very inferior to some of his mature productions. Nor was his rhetorical skill without similar juvenile antecedents:

"As our house was far from spacious, the bed-room which I occupied was but a corner of that in which these two clerks slept, boarded off, and fitted up with a bed, a table, and a chest of drawers, with a bookcase over it; and here, as long as my mother's brother continued to be an inmate of our family, he and I slept together. After he left us, however, to board and lodge elsewhere, I had this little nook to myself, and proud enough was I of my own apartment. Upon the door, and upon every other vacant space which my boundaries supplied, I placed inscriptions of my own composition, in the manner, as I flattered myself, of Shenstone's at the Leasowes. Thinking it the grandest thing in the world to be at the head of some literary institution, I organised my two shop-friends, Tom Ennis and Johnny Delany,