Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 38.djvu/389

 Lord Lansdowne. Scarcely was he established there when a sudden and entirely unforeseen calamity fell upon him by the defalcation of his deputy at Bermuda, which rendered him liable for 6,000l. In 1819 he took refuge in Paris, and almost immediately proceeded with Lord John Russell on a tour to Italy, where he met Byron at Venice, and received from him the gift of the 'Memoirs,' destined to give rise to so much discussion. He was unable to return to England until April 1822, when the debt to the admiralty, reduced by arrangement to 1,000l., was paid by the help of Lord Lansdowne, whom Moore, with his constant spirit of independence, insisted on repaying almost immediately. He returned to Paris for a time, and finally took up his abode in England in November. While in Paris he had written 'The Loves of the Angels,' a poem on the same subject as Lamartine's 'Chute d'un Ange,' and with affinities to Byron's far more striking 'Heaven and Earth;' for the rest much in the style of 'Lalla Rookh,' but inferior. The scriptural relations of the piece excited considerable reprehension, unreasonable from any point of view, and utterly unforeseen by Moore, who had conceived himself to be atoning for the sins of his youth by a poem full of sound morality. After selling four editions he bent to the storm, and 'turned his angels from Jews into Turks,' not much to the advantage of his poem. He had also while in Paris commenced a new poem, 'Alciphron,' which, not answering his wish, he rewrote as a prose fiction, 'The Epicurean,' which was published in 1827; 'Alciphron' being added as an appendix in 1839. The tale is striking and picturesque, but its utter infidelity to ancient manners, and ignorance of the system of philosophy which the hero is supposed to represent, brought upon Moore a severe and humorous castigation from T. L. Peacock in the 'Westminster Review' for 1827. In April 1824 appeared his first serious prose work, though the machinery is humorous, 'The Memoirs of Captain Rock.' It is an indictment of the Irish church, principally on the ground of tithe exactions, clever and not unjust, though necessarily one-sided. In October 1825 appeared 'The Life of Sheridan,' his early schoolfellow, which he had meditated for many years. It is a fairly adequate piece of work. Moore narrates agreeably, but has little gift for the delineation of character.

Byron meanwhile had died (April 1824), and the disposition to be made of his memoirs had become an urgent question [see under ]. It is difficult to believe that they might not have been published with some omissions, when we find Moore continually speaking in his diary of having read them with no expression of consternation or disgust. It is impossible, however, to judge positively of the weight of the objections in the absence of the document. Scott thought there was only one reason, but a sufficient one—'premat nox alta,' he adds. The perfect disinterestedness of Moore's conduct is unquestionable.

In November 1821 Moore had sold the 'Memoirs' to Murray, but on 17 May 1824 he induced Murray to return them to him, and at once burned them. But 'he repaid to Mr. Murray the sum (2,000 guineas) he had received for the "Memoirs," with interest' (Memoirs of John Murray, i. 444). To effect this, however, he had had to borrow from Longmans, and the desire to escape from debt led him ultimately, at the intercession of Hobhouse, to agree to write the life of Byron for Murray, the latter repaying the two thousand guineas, and adding 2,000l. more for the literary labour. It was indeed impossible that a tolerable biography should be written without the alliance of Moore and Murray, one having the best qualifications, and the other the best materials. The book appeared in 1830, and has ever since enjoyed a vigorous vitality as the indispensable companion of Byron's own writings. If Goethe's saying be true, that he who has done enough for his own time has done enough for all times, its reputation will long survive its circulation. It was exactly the biography which that age required: by no means complete or entirely authentic, nor claiming to be so, but presenting Byron in the light in which contemporaries desired to regard him, and in every respect a model of tact and propriety. The fearless criticism and the deep insight which are certainly missing were not at that time required, and until they are supplied elsewhere the work will rank as a classic, even though its interest be less due to the efforts of Moore's own pen than to the charm of the letters which he was the first to give to the world. The first edition was nevertheless published at a loss ; but the book soon established itself, and Murray engaged Moore to edit Byron's works, a task of which he acquitted himself ably. At the same time he produced the biography of a very different person, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, in which he evinced some signs of dissatisfaction with his old friends, the whigs. Another book, which might be regarded as patriotic in some of its aspects, appeared in 1834, 'Travels of an Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion.' Though little more