THOMAS MOORE.

The recent death of the Poet Moore has rendered it incumbent on us, as taking an interest in the literary honour of the empire, to give a brief sketch of his career. In this outline we scarcely need say that we shall be guided by the most perfect impartiality. We have the due feeling for the memory of genius, and the due respect for the sacredness of the grave. Though differing from Moore in political opinions, we shall be willing to give him the praise of sincerity; and, though declining panegyric, we shall with equal willingness give our tribute to the talents which adorned his country.

It is to be hoped that a Memoir will be supplied by some of those friends to whose known ability such a work can be intrusted; and with as much of his personal correspondence, and personal history, as may be consistent with the feelings of his family and the regard for his fame.

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on the 30th of May 1780. His parentage was humble; but it is the glory of Britain to disregard pedigree, where nature has given the ability which leads to distinction.

The period at which Moore first came before the public eye was one singularly exciting to Ireland. The Civil War under James II. had left bitterness in the Roman Catholic mind, and the Penal Laws gave ample topics for the declaimers. But, from the commencement of the reign of George III., those laws had undergone a course of extinction, and all the harsher parts of their pressure were gradually abolished.

We are not the panegyrists of those laws; they erred, in making thereligious beliefof the Romanist an object of penalty. Faith, let it be of whatever blindness, cannot be enlightened by force of law. But we are to remember, that the Irish Roman Catholics had been inarmsagainst their sovereign; that they had shed English blood in the quarrel of a religion notoriously persecuting; that they had brought foreign troops into the country in aid of their rebellion; and that they had formed an alliance with France, then at war with England. It was further to be remembered, that in their Parliament under a returned rebel, who had abdicated the throne of both islands—and whose success would have made Ireland a vassal, as he himself was a pensioner, of France—they had confiscated (against the most solemn promises) the property of two hundred leading Protestants, and would have eventually confiscated the whole property of Protestantism.

Ireland had made itself a field of battle, and the only relief for its emergencies was to make it agarrison.

The wisdom of that measure was shown in its fruits—the true test of all statesmanship: Ireland remained undisturbed forseventyyears. During the party and popular irritations of the two first Brunswick reigns, during the two Scottish invasions of 1715 and 1745, and during the American war, Ireland was perfectly tranquil—certainly not through loyalty, and as certainly through law. At that time there was no favoured party of agitation—no faction suffered to clamour itself into place, and the country into tumult. There was no relaxation of the laws of the land for scandalous intrigue or insolent importunity. The rule was strict, and strictly administered; no manufacture of grievance was permitted to give a livelihood to a disturber, and no celebrity was in the power of a demagogue, but the ascent to the pillory. Common sense, public justice, and vigilant law, were thetriadwhich governed Ireland, and their fruits were seen in the most rapid, vigorous, and extensive improvement of the country. No kingdom of Europe had ever so quickly obliterated the traces of civil war. Improvement was visible, in every form of national progress. Ireland had previously been a country of pasture, and, of course, of depopulation: it became a country of tillage. It had formerly been totally destitute of commerce: it now pushed its trade to the thriving States of America, and grew in wealth by the hour. It was formerly compelled, by the want of native manufactures, to purchase the clothing of its population from England: it now established the northern province as an emporium of the linen trade, which it still holds, and which is more than a gold mine to a crowded population.

The increase of human life in Ireland was perhaps the most memorable in the annals of statistics. In the beginning of the eighteenth century the population was calculated at little more than 700,000. It now started forth bymillions. And the national increase of wealth, intelligence, and public spirit, was shown in a manner equally significant and singular. Ireland had the honour ofinventing(if we may use the word) the Volunteers. The threat of a French invasion had alarmed the people, and Parliament asked the important question of the Viceroy, What forces were provided for the defence of the kingdom? His answer was, that he had but 7000 men at his disposal. The nation instantly determined to take the defence on themselves, and they raised an army such as the world had never before seen—wholly spontaneous in its rise, self-equipped, serving without pay, self-disciplined—80,000 men ready for the field!

The armies of Greece and Rome, even when republican, wereconscriptions; thelevée en massein France was compulsory, and the guillotine was the recruiting officer; the gigantic columns of the Imperial armies were chiefly raised under the absolute scourge. Theland-sturmof the Germans was created under the rigidity of a system which drove the whole population into the field—rightly and righteously drove them; for what but the low selfishness of brawling and bustling Radicalism, or the petty penury of superannuated avarice, would declare it a hardship to defend one’s own country, or hesitate to pay the manly and necessary expenditure which fitted them for that defence? But Ireland, without hesitation, and without stipulation—without the pitiful pusillanimity of a weaver’s soul and body, or the shrinking selfishness of a pawnbroker in the shape of a legislator—rushed to arms, and scared away invasion!

The expense of this illustrious effort was enormous, the occupation of time incalculable—but the act was heroic. And let what will come, whether Ireland is to have a career worthy of her natural powers, or to perish under the ascendancy of her deadly superstition, thatactwill form the brightest jewel in her historic diadem, as it will the noblest inscription on her tomb. But the whole effort implied the prosperity, as well as the patriotism, of the kingdom. Paupers cannot equip themselves for the field. The country must have had substantial resources to meet the expenditure. The arming of the volunteers would have exhausted the treasury of half the sovereigns of Europe, and yet the country bore it freely, fearlessly, and without feeling the slightest embarrassment in those efforts which were at the moment extending her interests through the world.

We have alluded to this fragment of Irish history, because it illustrates the system of fraud and falsehood under which pretended patriotism in Ireland has libelled, and continues to libel, England—a system which talks of peace, while it is perpetually provoking hostility; which boasts of its zeal for the country, while it is cutting up every root of national hope; and which is equally boastful in the streets, and cowardly in the field.

But another crisis came, and the manliness of the national character was to be tried in a still severer emergency. The Penal Laws were virtually extinguished, on the presumption that Popery was reconcilable by benefits, and that Irish patriotism was not always the language of conspiracy. The mistake was soon discernible in a Popish League for the subversion of the English Government. The “United Irishmen”—a name in itself a falsehood, for the object was to crush one-half of the nation, by establishing the tyranny of the other—were formed into a League. But the League was broken up, not in the field, but in the dungeon, and the insurrection was extinguished by the executioner. Wolfe Tone, the Secretary of the United Irishmen, came over in a French ship of war, to effect thepeacefulliberation of his “aggrieved country,” was imprisoned, and cut his own throat. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the hero of novels, and the martyr of poetry, lurked in the capital, in thesoldierlydisguise of a milkwoman, was taken in his bed, wounded in the arrest, and died of the wound. Not one of the leading conspirators died in the field; all who were not hanged begged their lives, delivered up their secrets for their own contemptible safety, and were transported to America, there to recover their courage, and wipe off their shame, by libelling England.

But among the most cruel acts of those villains was the attempt to involve the students of the University in their crime. Their converts were few, and those among the most obscure; but those were effectually ruined. A visitation was held under the Lord Chancellor Clare, and the delinquents were chiefly expelled. On this occasion Moore was questioned. His intimacy with the family of the Emmetts, who seem all to have been implicated in the charge, and his peculiar intercourse with the unfortunate and guilty Robert Emmett, who, a few years after, was hanged for open insurrection, rendered him liable to suspicion. He was accordingly examined at that formidable tribunal. But his stature was so undersized, his appearance so boyish, and his answers were given with such evident simplicity, that, to supposehimintrusted with the secrets of conspiracy, still less the sharer of a sanguinary revolt, seemed next to impossible, and he was dismissed without animadversion. Thus the future author of so many strains on the slavery of Ireland, and the tyranny of England, the publisher of such stores—

“Of fluent verse, and furious prose,Sweet songster of fictitious woes”—

“Of fluent verse, and furious prose,

Sweet songster of fictitious woes”—

was “quitte pour la peur,” and sent to receive the plaudits of his friends for his firmness, and the cautions of his own common sense with respect to his intimacies for the future.

Moore’s want of stature was an actual misfortune to him through life, which, though not shown with the bitterness of Byron on his lameness, must have been a source of perpetual vexation in society. He was one of the smallest men, perhaps, in existence, above a dwarf. Yet he was well-proportioned; and his lively countenance, which looked the very mirror of good-nature, aided by his manners, which had by instinct the grace of good society, made his figure, after the first introduction, almost forgotten. When he had established his fame, of course, none adverted to defects of any kind, and the “little Tom Moore” of Ireland became the Mr Moore of England, by the consent of all circles. He possessed, also, those gifts which create popularity. The people of Ireland have a remarkable fondness for music, and Moore was a musician by nature. Of music he knew nothing as a science, but he felt its soul. The heavy harmonies of Germany—in which the chief object is to show the toil of the performer and the patience of his auditory, to press discords into the service, and to crush the very sense of pleasure—would not have been endured by the Irish, who, like all lovers of the genuine art, prefer songs to musical problems, and to be bewitched rather than be bewildered. Moore, accordingly, cultivated the finer part—its feeling. He has been heard to say, “that if he had an original turn for anything, it was for music;” and he certainly produced, in his earliest career, some of the most original, tender, and tasteful melodies in existence for the Piano, which he touched with slight, but sufficient skill; and, sung to his own soft and sweet lines, he realised more of themagicof music than any performer whom we ever heard.

This subject, however apparently trivial, is not trifling in a Memoir of Moore; for, independently of its being his chief introduction into society, it was acharacteristicof the man. He was the originator of a style, in which he had many imitators, but no equal; and after he abandoned it for other means of shining, almost no follower. It was neither Italian, nor, as we have observed, German; it had neither the frivolity of the French school nor the wildness of the Irish; it was exclusively his own—a mixture of the playful and the pathetic; sweet, and yet singular; light, and yet often drawing tears. This effect, the finest in music—for what taste would compare a Sinfonia to a song?—he accomplished by the admirable management of a sweet voice, though but of small compass, accompanied by a few chords of the instrument, rather filling up the intervals of the voice than leading them: the whole rather an exquisite recitation than a song; the singer more theminstrelthan themusician.

This description of his early powers, however extravagant it may seem to strangers, will be recognised as literally true by those who heard him in Ireland, and in the budding of his talent. He was aninventor; his art required the united taste of the composer and the poet, and this accounts for its having perished with him.

But a larger field was soon to open before Moore. The Rebellion of 1798 was a death-blow to the hopes of all those sanguine speculators who longed to become Presidents of the new republic. It drained the national resources—it disgusted the national understanding—it made Ireland disunited, and England at once contemptuous of Irish feeling, and suspicious of Irish loyalty. The safety of the empire obviously rendered it impossible to leave in its rear a nation which might throw itself, at a moment’s notice, into the arms of France, Spain, or America—which had actually solicited a French army, and which still carried on transactions amounting to treason at home, and alliance abroad. Thus, theregeneratorsof Ireland, instead of raising her to a republic, sank her into a province. Even the dream of national independence was at an end; her Parliament was extinguished, and the only reality was theUnion.

Still, though the national pride was deeply hurt by the measure, the graver judgment of the nation acquiesced in the extinction of the Legislature. This was the fruit of those concessions which had been made by the ignorance of Government, and demanded by the intrigues of the Opposition. From the period of lowering the franchise to the Roman Catholic forty-shilling freeholder, the votes of the Romish peasantry became to the Government a terror, to the Opposition a snare, and to both, the sources of a new policy. In a few sessions more, the Parliament must have become almost totallyPapist. Thus, after much declamation in the clubs, and much murmuring in the streets—after threats of declaring the mover of the measure “an enemy to his country”—and after a duel between the celebrated Grattan, the head of the Opposition, and Corry, the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, the diadem was taken off the head of Ireland, and quietly lodged in Whitehall. England thenceforth became the field of Irish ambition, and the mart of Irish ability.

Moore came to London apparently for the purpose of commencing his studies as a barrister. Whether his volatile and fanciful spirit would have relished the details of a profession demanding so much labour in its rudiments, and so much perseverance in its pursuit, is now not worth a question, for he probably never opened a book of law; but he had brought with him a book of a more congenial kind; a translation ofAnacreon, to be published by subscription, and dedicated “by permission” to the Prince of Wales, (George IV.,)—an honour obtained, like all his early popularity, through his musical accomplishments.

Moore was not a scholar, in the sense of a Markland or a Bentley; but he had the best part of scholarship, the spirit of his author. The elegance of this versification of the old Greek lover of “smiles and wine” was universally acknowledged. All former translations ofAnacreonwere poor and pedantic, to the richness and grace of the volume then offered to the public eye.

Whether the original was the work of Ionia or Athens; whether one-half of the Odes were notimitationsin later Greek, with Gregory Nazianzen and a dozen others for their authors; whether Polycrates or Hipparchus was their patron—in short, the questions which still perplex Oxford, and break the rest of Cambridge—which drive both into the logomachies of Teutonic criticism, and waste English pens and patience on the imported drudgeries of the Leipsic press—were matters which gave the translator but slight trouble. Nature had created him for the translation—the praises of wine and beauty, of flowers and sunshine, were a language of his own; they formed his style through the greater part of his life; and Cupid and Bacchus never had a laureate more devoted, and more successful.

After lingering for some years in London, fêted by the great and followed by the little, Moore was appointed to an office in the West Indies. Thus was harshly hazarded the life of a man of genius; and the talent which was destined to distinguish his country was sent to take its chance of the yellow fever. The guest of princes and the favourite of fashion must have felt many a pang at finding himself consigned to Bermuda. The poetic romance of the “still vext Bermoothes” was probably insufficient to console him for the pavilion at Brighton, and the soirees of Portman Square. But necessity must not deliberate—theres angusta domiwas imperative—and the bard submitted to banishment with the grace and gaiety that never forsook him. The appointment was unfortunate. Connected with the public revenue, it had been transacted by deputy; and Moore, on his arrival, found himself answerable for the chasms in the official chest. No one chargedhimwith those chasms. But, as the lawyers hold, “the Crown makes no bad debts,” the unlucky poet was responsible in a sum which would have mortgaged all Parnassus, and made the Nine insolvent. The appointment was finally resigned, and Moore,solutus negotiis, shook off the dust of his feet against the gates of the West Indies.

Taking advantage of his proximity to America, he now resolved to visit the great Republic, Canada, and the wonder of the Transatlantic world, Niagara!

America was made by Moore the subject of some spirited poetry; but it had another effect, less expected, yet equally natural—it cured him of Republicanism. The lofty superstitions which haunt the sepulchres of Greece and Rome, the angry ambition which stimulated the Irish patriot into revolt, or that fantasy of righting the wrongs of all mankind, which put live coals into the hands of the Frenchman to heap on the altar of imaginary freedom, were all extinguished by the hard reality before his eyes. He found the Americans, as all have found them, vigorous, active, and persevering in their own objects; men of canals, corduroy roads, and gigantic warehouses; sturdy reclaimers of the swamp and the forest; bold backwoodsmen, and shrewd citizens, as they ought to be; but neither poets nor painters, nor touched with the tendernesses of romance, nor penetrating the profound of philosophy. Even their patriotism startled the mourner over the sufferings of theIsle of Saints; and theLedger, more honoured than theLegend, offended all his reveries of a

“Paradise beyond the main,Unknown to lucre, lash, and chain.”

“Paradise beyond the main,

Unknown to lucre, lash, and chain.”

Even the habits of Republicanism were found too primitive to be pleasing. He had the honour of an interview with Jefferson, then president; and this “four years’ monarch” received him in his nightgown and slippers, and stretched at his length on a sofa. Moore recoiled at this display ofnonchalance, and would have been perfectly justified in turning on his heel, and leaving this vulgarism to the indulgence of “showing a Britisher” the manners of a “free and intelligent citizen.” This rough specimen of freedom disgusted him, as well it might; and though Republicanism in rhyme might still amuse his fancy, he evidently shrank from the reality ever after.

Canada increased his poetical sketches. He wrote some spirited Odes on its stern landscape, and some bitter lines on the United States, in revenge for its extinction of his dreams. But, with America, he left all revolution behind him, and never more cast a “longing, lingering look” on the subversion of thrones.

On his return to Europe, he found it necessary to consider into what new path he was to turn. He had long left the hope of shining on the bench; office was now closed upon him; authorship was his only resource; and to authorship he turned with all the quickness of his nature, sharpened by the Roman’s

“MAGISTER ARTIS, VENTER.”

The exertion became more important to him, from his having made a disinterested match; and, in the spirit of a poet, been contented to take beauty as the marriage portion. He now retired into the country, and prepared for a life of vigorous authorship. In this choice, he evidently consulted his immediate circumstances more than the natural direction of his mind. Such a man was made for cities; all his habits were social, and he must have languished for society. The cooing of doves and the songs of nightingales were not the music to accompany such verses as these—

“Fly not yet, ’tis just the hour,When pleasure, like the midnight flower,That scorns the eye of vulgar light,Begins to bloom for sons of night,And maids who love the moon.”

“Fly not yet, ’tis just the hour,

When pleasure, like the midnight flower,

That scorns the eye of vulgar light,

Begins to bloom for sons of night,

And maids who love the moon.”

We can imagine the look of melancholy with which, after having finished his stanzas, Moore gave a moonlight glance to the woods and wilds, as he stood at his cottage door, and thought of the lively scenes at that moment glittering in London. Solitude may be the place of the philosopher, and universities the stronghold of science; but, for the knowledge of life, the play of character, the vigour of manly competitorship, and even the variety of views, events, and character, which make the true materials of the poetic faculty, association with our kind is indispensable. The poet in retirement either becomes the worship of a circle of women, who pamper him with panegyric, until he degenerates into silliness; or, living alone, becomes the worse thing—a worshipper of himself. Like a garrison cut off from its supplies, he lives on short allowance of ideas; like a hermit, thinks his rags sanctity, and his nonsense Oracles; or, like Robinson Crusoe, imagines his geese conversible, and his island an empire.

It is true, that Moore suffered less from this famine of poetic food than most of his race. His buoyancy of spirit never lost sight wholly of London, and his annual visit to the concerts and conversations of Berkeley Square, and other scenes of high life, refreshed his recollections. But when he tells us thatLalla Rookhwas written “amid the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters,” and, in a phraseology which seems like apologising to himself for this exile, talks of his “being enabled by thatconcentrationof thought, whichretirement alonecan give, to call up around him some of the sunniest of his Eastern scenes,” the very toil and turgidity of the language show us that he felt himself in thewrongplace. In fact, now that naked necks, turned-down shirt-collars, and dishevelled hair, no longer make poetsà laByron—when even the white waistcoats of Young England are no longer proof of chivalry—we wish to save the innocent hearts and fantastic heads of the rising generation from the experiment which Don Quixote performed so little to the satisfaction of Sancho Panza in the desert. We never heard of a great poet living a hundred miles from a metropolis. Contiguity to the world of men and women was essential. All the leaders of the tribe lived as near London as they could. Cowley lived within a walk, Pope within a drive, Milton within sight, of the walls—Shakspeare saw London Bridge every day of his life—Dryden lived in the Grecian Coffeehouse—Byron, with his own goodwill, never would have stirred out of Bond Street; and when the newspapers and Doctors’ Commons at length drove him abroad, he nestled down in Venice, instead of singing among the slopes of the Apennines, or acting distraction among the pinnacles of the Alps. It is even not improbable that the last few and melancholy years of Moore’s life owed some of their depression to the weariness of this unnatural solitude.

On his return from America in 1803, we lose sight of him for a while. He was then probably harassed by government transactions connected with his luckless appointment; but in 1805 he gave unhappy evidence of his revival by the publication ofPoems by Mr Thomas Little.

We have no desire to speak of this work. Perhaps “his poverty, but not his will,” was in fault. He made some kind of apology at the time, by attributing the performance “to an imagination which had become the slave of the passions;” and subsequently he made the better apology of excluding it from his collected volumes. Yet, in this work, he did less harm to society than injustice to himself. The graver classes, of course, repelled it at once; the fashionable world took but little notice of a book which could not be laid in their drawing-rooms; and the profligate could be but little excited by its babyisms, for Moore’s amatory poems were always babyish. They wanted, in a remarkable degree, the fervency of passion. They prattled rather than felt: they babbled of lips and eyes like an impudent child; their Cupid was always an Urchin, and the urchin was always in the nursery. His verses of this school were flowing, but they never rose above prettiness; they never exhibited love in its living reality—in its seriousness and power—its madness of the brain, and absorption of the soul—its overwhelming raptures, and its terrible despair. There is a deeper sense of the truth and nature ofpassionin a single ballad of Burns than in all the amatory poems that Moore ever wrote.

The injustice to himself consisted in his thus leaving it in the hands of every stranger, to connect the life of the man with the licentiousness of the author. Yet we have never heard that his life was other than decorous; his conversation certainly never offended general society—his manners were polished—and we believe that his mind was at all times innocent of evil intention. Still, these poems threw a long shade on the gentle lustre of his fame.

He now fell under the lash of theEdinburgh Review, never more sternly, and seldom so justly, exercised. Moore indignantly sent a message to the editor. Jeffrey, refusing to give up the name of the Zoilus in disguise, accepted the message, and the parties met. Fortunately some friend, with more sense than either, sent alsohismessage, but it was to the Bow Street magistrates, and the belligerents were captured on the field. In conveying the instruments of war to Bow Street, the bullets had fallen out; and this circumstance was, of course, too comic to be forgotten by the wits. The press shot forth its epigrams, the point of which was the harmlessness of the hostilities. It was observed—

“That the pistols were leadlessIs no sort of news,Forblank-cartridge should alwaysBe fired atReviews.”

“That the pistols were leadless

Is no sort of news,

Forblank-cartridge should always

Be fired atReviews.”

We transcribe but another squib.

“A Scotchman and Irishman went out to fight,Both equal in fierceness, both equal in fright;Not a pin, ’twixt the heroes, in valour to choose,The son of theScissors, and son of the Muse.”

“A Scotchman and Irishman went out to fight,

Both equal in fierceness, both equal in fright;

Not a pin, ’twixt the heroes, in valour to choose,

The son of theScissors, and son of the Muse.”

The whole affair was an illustration of the barbaric absurdity of duelling. Lord Brougham was subsequently supposed to be the layer on of the critical lash. If Jeffrey had given him up, Moore would have shot him if he could; and if Brougham had survived, he would have shot Jeffrey. Thus, two of the cleverest men of their day might have been victims to the bastard chivalry of the nineteenth century. How Moore himself would have fared in the fray, no one can tell; but being as honourably savage as any of his countrymen, and as untameable as a tiger-cat, he would certainly have shot somebody, or got pistolled himself.

His next work was an opera. This attempt did not encourage him in trial of the stage. It had but a brief existence. Moore, though lively, was not a wit; and though inventive, was not dramatic. The inimitable “Duenna” of the inimitable Sheridan has expelled all Opera from the English stage, by extinguishing all rivalry.

But a broader opportunity now spread before him. A musical collector in Ireland had compiled a volume of the Native melodies, which, though generally rude in science, and always accompanied by the most aboriginal versification, attracted some publicity. Moore, in his happiest hour, glanced over these songs, and closed with the proposal of a publisher in Ireland to write the poetry, and bring the melodies themselves into acivilisedform. The latter object he effected by the assistance of Stevenson, an accomplished musician, and even a popular composer: the former might be safely intrusted to himself.

It is to be remembered (though Ireland may be wroth to the bottom of its sensibilities) that its most remote musical pedigree falls within the last century; that all beyond is shared with Scotland; and that the harmonies which Ossian shook from his harp, and which rang in the palaces of Fingal, and the nursing of Romulus and Remus, have equal claims to authenticity. Beyond the last century, the claims of Ireland to music were disputed by Scotland; and there was a species of partnership in their popular airs. But the true musician of Ireland was Carolan, a blind man who wandered about the houses of the country gentlemen, like Scott’s minstrel, except that his patriotism was less prominent than his love of eating and drinking. He thought more of pay than of Party, and limited his Muse to her proper subjects—Love and Wine. But he was a musician by nature, and therefore worth ten thousand by art; and the finest melodies in Moore’s portfolio were the product of a mind which had no master, and no impulse but its genius.

Time had not weaned Moore from the absurdity of imagining that every rebel must be a hero, or that men who universally begged their lives, or died by the rope, were the true regenerators of the country. His early connection with the Emmett family had been distressingly renewed by the execution of Robert Emmett, justly punished for a combination of folly and wickedness, perhaps without example in the narratives of impotent convulsion. Emmett was a barrister, struggling through the first difficulties of his difficult profession, when somebody left him a luckless legacy of five hundred pounds. He laid it all out in powder and placards, and resolved to “make a Rebellion.” Without any one man of note to join him, without even any one patron or member of faction to give the slightest assistance, without any one hope but inmiracle, he undertook to overthrow the Government, to crush the army, to extinguish the Constitution, to remodel the Aristocracy, to scourge the Church, to abolish the throne, and, having achieved these easy matters, to place Mr Robert Emmett on the summit of Irish empire.

Accordingly, he purchased a green coat with a pair of gold epaulettes; rushed from a hovel in a back street, at the head of about fifty vagabonds with pikes; was met and beaten by a party of yeomanry going to parade; ran away with hisarmy; hid himself in the vicinity of Dublin for a few days; was hunted out, and was tried and hanged. Those are the actual features of the transaction, where poetry has done its utmost to blazon the revolt, and partisanship has lavished its whole budget of lies on the heroism of the revolter; thosearethe facts, and the only facts, of Mr Robert Emmett’s revolution.

Moore made his full advantage of the disturbances of the time; and it must be allowed that they wonderfully improved his poetry. Their strong reality gave it a strength which it never possessed before, and the imaginary poutings of boys and girls were vividly exchanged for the imaginary grievances of men. What can be more animated than these lines:—

“Oh, for the swords of former time!Oh, for the men who bore them!When, armed for Right, they stood sublime,And tyrants crouched before them.When, pure yet, ere courts beganWith honours to enslave him,The best honours worn by man,Were those which virtue gave him.Oh, for the swords, &c.”

“Oh, for the swords of former time!

Oh, for the men who bore them!

When, armed for Right, they stood sublime,

And tyrants crouched before them.

When, pure yet, ere courts began

With honours to enslave him,

The best honours worn by man,

Were those which virtue gave him.

Oh, for the swords, &c.”

Or this—

“Forget not the field where they perished,The truest, the last of the brave!All gone, and the bright hope we cherishedGone with them, and quenched in their grave.Oh, could we from Death but recoverThose hearts as they bounded before,In the face of high heaven to fight overThis combat for freedom once more.”

“Forget not the field where they perished,

The truest, the last of the brave!

All gone, and the bright hope we cherished

Gone with them, and quenched in their grave.

Oh, could we from Death but recover

Those hearts as they bounded before,

In the face of high heaven to fight over

This combat for freedom once more.”

The phrase used in the speeches of the late “Agitator,” till it grew ridiculous by the repetition, will be found in the following fine lines:—

“Remember thee! yes, while there’s life in this heart,It shall never forget thee, all lorn as thou art,More dear in thy sorrow, thy gloom and thy showers,Than the rest of the world in their sunniest hours.Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free,First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea,I might hail thee with prouder, with happier brow,But, oh, could I love thee more deeply than now?No! thy chains, as they rankle, thy blood, as it runs,But make thee more painfully dear to thy sons,Whose hearts, like the young of the desert-bird’s nest,Drink love in each life-drop that flows from thy breast.”

“Remember thee! yes, while there’s life in this heart,

It shall never forget thee, all lorn as thou art,

More dear in thy sorrow, thy gloom and thy showers,

Than the rest of the world in their sunniest hours.

Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free,First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea,I might hail thee with prouder, with happier brow,But, oh, could I love thee more deeply than now?

Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free,

First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea,

I might hail thee with prouder, with happier brow,

But, oh, could I love thee more deeply than now?

No! thy chains, as they rankle, thy blood, as it runs,But make thee more painfully dear to thy sons,Whose hearts, like the young of the desert-bird’s nest,Drink love in each life-drop that flows from thy breast.”

No! thy chains, as they rankle, thy blood, as it runs,

But make thee more painfully dear to thy sons,

Whose hearts, like the young of the desert-bird’s nest,

Drink love in each life-drop that flows from thy breast.”

It would becruelto ask for the evidence of all this tyranny—a link of the chains that rankle on the limbs of Ireland, or a drop of the blood that so perpetually oozes from her wounds. But poetry is privileged to be as “unhappy” as it pleases—to weep over sorrows unfelt by the world—and to fabricate wrongs, only to have the triumph of sweeping them away. We would tolerate half the harangues of the Irish disturbers for one poet like Moore.

Some of the most finished of those verses were devoted to the memory of Emmett, and they could not have been devoted to a subject more unworthy of his poetry. In Ireland, for the last five hundred years, every fault, folly, and failure of the nation is laid to the charge of England. The man whoinventsa “grievance” is sure to be popular; but if he is to achieve the supreme triumph of popularity, he must fasten his grievance on the back of England; and if he pushes his charge into practice, and is ultimately banished or hanged, he is canonised in the popular calendar of patriotism. This absurdity, equally unaccountable and incurable, actually places Emmett in the rank of the Wallaces and Kosciuskos;—thus degrading men of conduct and courage, encountering great hazards for great principles, with a selfish simpleton, a trifler with conspiracy, and a runaway from the first sight of the danger which he himself had created. Moore’s hero was a feeble romancer; his national regenerator a street rioter; and his patriotic statesman merely a giddy gambler, who staked his pittance on a silly and solitary throw for supremacy, and saw his stake swept away by the policeman! Totally foolish as Ireland has ever been in her politics, she ought to be most ashamed of this display before the world—of inaugurating this stripling-revolutionist, this fugitive champion, this milk-and-water Jacobin, among her claims to the homage of posterity. Yet this was the personage on whose death Moore wrote these touching lines:—

“O breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,Where cold and unhonoured his relics are laid;Sad, silent, and dark, be the tears that we shed,As the night-dew that falls on the grass o’er his head.But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,Still brightens with verdure the grave where he sleeps,And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.”

“O breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,

Where cold and unhonoured his relics are laid;

Sad, silent, and dark, be the tears that we shed,

As the night-dew that falls on the grass o’er his head.

But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,

Still brightens with verdure the grave where he sleeps,

And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,

Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.”

On the death of the celebrated Richard Brinsley Sheridan, some of his Notes and Manuscripts were put into Moore’s hands, and the alliance constituted by the Whiggism of both was presumed to insure a satisfactory tribute to the remembrance of perhaps the most gifted man of the age. But their Whiggism was different; Sheridan’s was party, and Moore’s was prejudice. Sheridan had put on and off his Whiggism, with the grave affectation, or the sarcastic ease, of one who knew its worthlessness; Moore adopted it with the simplicity of ignorance, and the blind passion of the native character. The result was, a biography that pleased no one. Those whom Sheridan had lashed in the House of Commons, thought that it was too laudatory; while his admirers charged it with injustice. However, to those who cared nothing for the partisanship of either, the volume was amusing, occasionally eloquent, though less anecdotical than was to be expected from a career almostone anecdotefrom the beginning. On the whole, it sustained Moore’s reputation.

HisLife of Byron, at a later period, had an increased popularity. The subject was singularly difficult; Byron had provoked a quarrel with the world, and was proud of the provocation. He had led a career of private petulance, which was deeply offensive to individuals, and he disclaimed all respect for those higher decorums which society demands. The power of his verse had thrown a shield over the living poet, but a severe tribunal apparently awaited the dead. Moore accomplished his task with dexterity, judicious selection, and still more judicious suppression, were exercised; and he was enabled to produce a performance at once faithful to the fame of the dead, and free from insult to the living.

A more reluctant glance must be given to Moore’s political writings. In this unhappy digression from the natural pursuits of a poet, Moore showed all themonomaniaof the Irish Papist. England is now familiar with the singular contradiction of fact to phrase, which exists in all the partisanship of Ireland. The first principle of the modern orator in Ireland is a reckless defiance of the common sense of mankind; facts fly before him, and truths are trampled under his heel. In the most insolent challenges to the law, he complains that he is tongue-tied; in the most extravagant license of libel, he complains of oppression; and in the most daring outrage against authority, he complains that he is aslave! Summoning public meetings for the purpose of extinguishing the Government, and summoning them withimpunity, he pronounces the Government to be a tyrant, and the land a dungeon. The reader who would conceive the condition of Ireland from its Papist speakers must think that he is listening to the annals of Norfolk Island, or the mysteries of a Frenchoubliette. Moore’s politics shared themonomaniaof his Popish countrymen.

But he suddenly turned to more congenial objects, and produced his popular poem ofLalla Rookh. The scenery of India gave full opportunity to the luxuriance of his style; the wildness of Indian adventure, and the novelty of Indian romance, excited public curiosity, and the volume found its way into every drawing-room, and finally rested in every library. But there its course ended; the glitter which at first dazzled, at length exhausted, the public eye. We might as well look with unwearied delight on a piece of tissue, and be satisfied with vividness of colour, in place of vividness of form. Moore’s future fame will depend on hisNational Melodies.

He received large sums for some of his volumes; but what are occasional successes, when their products must be expanded over a life! He always expressed himself as in narrow circumstances, and his retired mode of living seemed to justify the expression. Towards the close of his days, his friend the Marquis of Lansdowne obtained for him a pension of £300 a-year. But he had not long enjoyed this important accession to his income before his faculties began to fail. His memory was the first to give way; he lingered, in increasing decay, for about two years, till on the 26th of February he died, at the age of nearly 72.

His funeral took place in a neighbouring churchyard, where one of his daughters was buried. It was so strictly and so unnecessarily private that but two or three persons attended, of the many who, we believe, would have willingly paid the last respect to his remains.

Thus has passed away a great poet from the world—a man whose manners added grace to every circle in which he moved—animation to the gay, and sentiment to the refined. If England holds his remains, Ireland is the heir of his fame; and if she has a sense of gratitude, she will give some public testimonial of her homage to the genius which has given another ray to the lustre of her name.

Back to Index Next