Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/835

Rh MOORE 805 manca, where lie waited to see what would happen. He heard that a subsidiary force under Sir David Baird had arrived at Corunna, and ordered it up to join him. At Salamanca he remained a whole month watching the triumphant successes of Napoleon and his lieutenants, and learning how little Spanish reports or Spanish valour were to be relied on. Though irritated by the menaces and abuse of Frere, the English minister to the junta, he waited till the 13th December, hearing daily of Spanish defeats, and then he determined to draw off upon his own small force the weight of Napoleon s power, and thus give Andalucia the winter in which to organize an army and prepare for another Baylen. With this intention he advanced through Toro and Mayorga, where Baird joined him, to Sahagun. He judged rightly that Napoleon would never advance into Andalucia and leave the English behind him, but that he would turn all his power against them. Having once drawn Napoleon s attention to himself, he began his famous retreat and fell back quickly, fighting every day and invariably with success. He now could test the military spirit he had taught at Shorncliffe, for the reserve under Sir Edward Paget consisted entirely of his own light regiments. To detail each step of the retreat and every skirmish would be but to rewrite Napier ; suffice it to say that, with great loss of life and material, Moore reached Corunna on 12th January 1809. But the fleet to take the army home was not there ; and the English would have to fight Soult, whose army was even more weakened and demoralized than Moore s, before they could embark. It was on 16th January that Moore fought his last battle ; he fell early in the day, and knew at once that his wound was mortal. His last hours were cheered with the know ledge of victory, but were spent in recommending his old friends, such as Graham and Colborne, to the notice of the Government. Sir H. Hardinge s description of these hours is in its way inimitable, and in it must be studied how a modern Bayard should die in battle, every thought being for others, none for himself. It may be possible in the face of his heroic death to exaggerate Moore s actual military services, but his influence on the British army cannot be overrated. The true military spirit of discipline and of valour, both in officers and men, had become nearly extinct during the American war. Abereromby, who looked back to the traditions of Minden, was the first to attempt to revive it, and his work was carried on by Moore. The formation of the light regi ments at Shorncliffe was the answer to the new French tactics, and it was left to Wellington to show the success of the experiment. Moore s powers as a statesman are shown in his despatches written .it Salamanca, and he had the truest gift of a great man, that of judging men. It may be noticed that, while Wellington perpetually grumbled at the bad Dualities of his officers and formed no school, Moore s name is .associated with the career of all who made their mark. Among generals, Hope, Graham, Sir E. Paget, Hill, and Craufurd, all felt and submitted to his ascendency, and of younger officers it was ever the proud boast of the Napiers, Colborne, the Beckwiths, and Barnard that they were the pupils of Moore, not of Wellington. Nay more, he inspired an historian. The description of Moore s retreat in Napier is perhaps the finest piece of military history in the English language, not only because the author was present, but because his heart was with the leader of that retreat ; and, if Napier felt towards Wellington as the soldiers of the tenth legion felt towards Ciesar, he felt towards Moore the personal love and devotion of a cavalier towards Montrose. The great authority for Moore s life is the Life of Sir John Moore, by his brother, J. C. Moore (1833); see also Narrative of the Campaign of Sir John of the lit. lion. J. H. Frere (published in vol. i. of his works). Consult also Wilson, Campaign in Egypt, for Moore s services there, and the Life of Gilbert Elliot, First Lord Minto, for the squabble in Corsica. (H. M. S.) MOORE, THOMAS (1779-1852), born at Dublin on 28th May 1779, fairly shares with Lord Byron the honour of being the most popular poet of his generation. Whatever may be thought now of the intrinsic qualities of his verse, this much cannot be denied. The most trustworthy of all measures of popularity is the price put upon a writer s work in the publishing market, and when Moore s friend Perry, in negotiating the sale of the unwritten Lalla Rookh, claimed for the poet the highest price that had up to that time been paid for a poem the publisher at once assented. Moore was then in the heyday of his reputation, but twenty years later publishers were still willing to risk their thou sands on his promise to produce. Much of Moore s success was due to his personal charm. This at least gave him the start on his road to popularity. There is not a more extraordinary incident in the history of our literature than the instantaneousness with which the son of a humble Dublin grocer just out of his teens, on his first visit to London, captivated the fashionable world and established himself in the course of a few months as one of its prime favourites. The youth crossed St George s Channel in 1799 to keep terms at the Middle Temple, carrying with him a translation of the Odes of Anacreon, which he wished to publish by subscription. In a very short time he had enrolled half the fashionable world among his subscribers, and had obtained the permission of the prince of Wales to dedicate the work to him. The mere power of writing graceful and fluent amatory verses would not alone have enabled the poet to work this miracle. Moore s social gifts were of the most engaging kind. He charmed all whom he met, and charmed them, though he was not a trained musician, with nothing more than with his singing of his own songs. The piano, and not the harp, was his instru ment, but he came nearer than anybody else in modern times to Bishop Percy s romantic conception of the minstrel. To find a parallel to him we must go back to the palmy days of Provencal song, to such troubadours and jongleurs as Arnaud Daniel and Perdigon, whose varied powers of entertainment made them welcome guests wherever they went. It was not merely the fashionable world that the young adventurer captivated ; the landlady of his lodgings in London, a countrywoman of his own, offered to place at his disposal all the money of which she had the command. The fragment of autobiography in which Moore draws a softly-coloured picture of his early life in Dublin lets us into the secret of the seeming miracle of his social con quest. Externals apart, the spirit of his social surround ings in Little Aungier Street had much in common with the society to which he was introduced in London. He was born in the proscribed sect of Catholics, whose exclu sion from the society of the Castle produced a closer union among their various ranks, and thus, from the first, Moore was no stranger to the more refined gaieties of social inter course. It was, upon the whole, a gay life in Catholic society, though the conspiracy of the United Irishmen was being quietly formed beneath the surface. Amateur theatricals was one of their favourite diversions, and gifts of reciting and singing were not likely to die for want of applause. Moore s schoolmaster was a leader in these entertainments, a writer of prologues and epilogues and incidental songs; and at a very early age Master Thomas Moore was one of his show-boys, ardently encouraged in all his exercises by a very affectionate mother at home. Before he left school he had acquired fame in his own circle as a song-writer, and had published, in the Anthologia Hibernica, verses &quot; to Zelia on her charging the author with writing too much on love.&quot; This was in 1793. In that year the prohibition against Catholics entering Trinity College was removed, and next year Moore took advantage of the new freedom. As one of the first Catholic entrants, he had an exceptional stimulus to work, and there industriously acquired that classical scholarship with which he won the hearts of such learned Whigs as Lansdowne and Holland, while he charmed fashionable ladies with the grace of his songs. Young Moore s social atmosphere was, of course, strongly charged with patriotism and hatred of the excesses of