Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/58

 was a sketchiness about them, a detachment from time and circumstance—I always hated being told the whole of everything—which led me day after day into fresh fields of conjecture. The nymph who was encircled by a rainbow, and bore a radiant son; the scimitars that were so dazzling they made the warriors wink; the sacred well which reflected the moon at midday; and the great embassy that was sent "from some port of the Indies"—a welcome vagueness of geography—to recover a monkey's tooth, snatched away by some equally nameless conqueror;—what child could fail to love such floating stars of erudition?

Our great-grandfathers were profoundly impressed by Moore's text-book acquirements. The "Monthly Review" quoted a solid page of the notes to dazzle British readers, who confessed themselves amazed to find a fellow countryman so much "at home" in Persia and Arabia. Blackwood authoritatively announced that Moore was familiar, not only "with the grandest regions of the human soul,"—which is expected of a poet,—but also with the remotest boundaries of the East; and that in