Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/836

Rh 806 MOORE English despotism. Some of his closest friends in Trinity were deep in the conspiracy of 1798. But even for his patriotism a genuine passion which he never sought to disguise Moore found plenty of sympathy among the Whig political leaders, when he made their acquaintance in the first years of the century. Moore was fairly established in London society in the first year of the century, and from that time the hope of its applause was the ruling aspiration of his life and its judgment the standard of his work. In his letters to his mother, which are delightful prose lyrics and show the most charming side of Moore s character he wrote to her constantly and with warm affection in his busiest weeks we find him, even in 1800, declaring himself surfeited with duchesses and marchionesses, and professing his readiness at any moment to exchange all his fineries for Irish stew and salt fish. But he never did make the exchange, even for more potent attractions than the fare of his youth. He could not bear the shortest banishment from fashionable drawing-rooms without uneasy longings. The dignity and ease, the luxury, the gaiety, the bright ness of fashionable life, wholly satisfied his joyous and self- indulgent nature. When men of rank courted his company, when princesses sang his songs and peeresses wept at them, Moore was too frank to affect indifference ; he was in the highest heaven of delight, and went home to record the incident to his relatives or transmit it to posterity in his diary. If prudence whispered that he was frittering away his time and dissipating his energies, he persuaded him self that his conduct was thoroughly worthy of a solid man of business : that to get a lucrative appointment from his political friends he must keep himself in evidence, and that to make his songs sell he must give them a start with his own voice. But his mind was seemingly not much troubled either with sordid care or with sober pru dence ; he lived in the happy present, and he liked fashionable company for its own sake, and no wonder, seeing how he was petted, caressed, and admired. Swift s saying that great men never reward in a more substantial way those whom they make the companions of their pleasures was often in Moore s mind. It was verified to some extent in his own case. Through Lord Moira s influence he was appointed registrar of the admiralty court in Bermuda in 1803. He went there to take possession, but four or five months of West India society, jingling pianofortes, and dusky beauties bored him excessively, and he appointed a deputy and returned to London, after little more than a year s absence. The office continued to bring him about 400 a year for fourteen or fifteen years, but at the end of that time embezzlement by the deputy, for whom he was responsible, involved him in serious embarrassment. This was all that Moore received from his great political friends, no great boon as things went in the days of patronage. He had hopes from Lord Moira in the Grenville ministry in 1806, hopes of an Irish commissionership or something substantial, but the king s obstinacy about Catholic emanci pation destroyed the ministry before anything worth having turned up. The poet s long-deferred hopes were finally extinguished in 1812, when Lord Moira, under the Liverpool administration, went out as governor -general to India without making any provision for him. From that time Moore set himself in earnest to make a living by literature, his responsibilities being increased by his marriage in 1811. From his boyhood to 1812 may be called the first period of Moore s poetical activity. He had formed the design of translating Anacreon while still at college, and several of the pieces published in 1801 under the nom de plume of &quot; Thomas Little &quot; were written before he was eighteen. The somewhat ostentatious scholarship of the notes to his Anacreon, the parade of learned authorities, he explained by his habit of omnivorous reading in Trinity College library. Throughout his literary life he retained this habit of out-of-the-way reading and clever display of it. Moore had really abundance of miscellaneous scholarship as well as great quickness in the analogical application of his knowledge ; and, though he made sad havoc of quantities when he tried to write in Greek, there was probably no scholar of his time who would have surpassed him in the interpretation of a difficult passage. He seems to have spent a good deal of time in the libraries of the great houses that he frequented ; Moira, Lansdowne, and Holland were all scholarly men and book-collectors. It might be asked, What had &quot; passion s warmest child,&quot; whose &quot; only books were women s looks,&quot; to do with obscure mediaeval epigrammatists, theologians, and commentators 1 But it would seem that Moore took the hints for many of his lyrics from books, and, knowing the great wealth of fancy among mediaeval Latinists, turned often to them as likely quarters in which to find some happy word-play or image that might serve as a motive for his muse. The public, of course, were concerned with the product and not with the process of manufacture, and &quot; Little s &quot; songs at once became the rage in every drawing-room. He found his songs in Virginia when he landed there on his way to Bermuda. And not only were his songs sung but his poems were read, passing rapidly through many editions. The bulk of them were simple fancies, gracefully, fluently, and sometimes wittily expressed, the lyrist s models being the amatory poets of the 17th century from Carew to Rochester. Carew is the only eminent poet of that century with whom Moore will bear comparison. The highest praise that can be given to his amatory lyrics is that he knew his audience, wrote directly for them, and pleased them more than any of his competitors. His publication of 1806 was savagely reviewed in the Edin burgh by Jeffrey, who accused him of a deliberate design to corrupt the minds of innocent maidens with his wanton fancies, and who had in consequence to figure in a ludicrous attempt at a duel ludicrous in its circumstances, though Moore was ferociously in earnest. We may well acquit Moore of the diabolic intention attributed to him, but Jeffrey s criticism of his poetry as poetry was just enough. The only parts of the volume that Jeffrey praised were the satirical epistles. The vein essayed in these epistles Moore pursued afterwards in his Corruption, Intolerance (1808), and The Sceptic, a philosophical satire (1809) ; but as long as he kept to the heroic couplet and the manner of Pope he could not give full scope to his peculiar powers as a satirist. It may be remarked in passing that the result of the hostile meeting with Jeffrey is a striking evidence of the impressiveness of Moore s personality ; in the course of a few minutes conversation he changed a bitter critic into a lifelong friend. Of all the poetical enterprises that Moore undertook, either at this period or later, none was so exactly suited to his powers as the task proposed to him by the publisher Power of supplying fit words to a collection of Irish melodies. The first number appeared in 1807, and it was so successful that for twenty-seven years afterwards writing words to music was one of Moore s most regular occupations and his steadiest source of income, Power pay ing him an annuity of 500. Six numbers of Irish melodies were published before 1815; then they turned to sacred songs and national airs, issuing also four more numbers of Irish melodies before 1834. Moore entered into this work with his best and most practised powers and with all his heart. From his boyhood he had been in training for it. The most characteristic moods of Irish feeling, grave and gay, plaintive and stirring, were embodied in those airs, and their variety touched the whole range of Moore s sensi tive spirit, carrying him far beyond the shallows of his