Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 094.djvu/390

380 profession, for his father, growing tired of a business which was not unremunerative, obtained a quartermaster's commission, and in that capacity "did the state some service." Of his parents, Moore always spoke in the most affectionate terms, and in the Preface to the "Collected Edition" of his works, he says: "At home, a most amiable father, and a mother such as in heart and head has rarely been equalled, furnished me with that purest stimulus to exertion—the desire to please those whom we, at once, both love and respect." Another record of his love for his mother—the holiest tie that links us to earth—is also to be found in those exquisite lines beginning, "They tell us of an Indian tree," which he wrote in a pocket-book in 1822. That he was not ashamed of his father's original calling, though he no doubt thought him above it, the following anecdote sufficiently testifies. When introduced by the Earl of Moira to the Prince of Wales, soon after the publication of his translation of "Anacreon," his royal highness inquired of the poet whether he were not the son of Dr. Moore, the author of "Zeluco?" "No, sir,” replied Moore, without hesitation; "my father was a grocer in Dublin."

To the parents whom he thus loved and honoured, the poet was indebted for that inappreciable benefit, a good education. He was sent, in the first instance, to an excellent school, kept by a Mr. Whyte, who, thirty years before, had been the preceptor of Richard Brinsley Sheridan,—less advantageously to the pupil than in Moore's case—for after about a year's trial, the future "orator, dramatist, minstrel," was dismissed by his tutor as "an incorrigible dunce." Moore, however, was one of Mr. Whyte's favourite scholars—his "show-scholar," as he himself says; and the development of his poetic faculty received early encouragement from his master, who had a passion for private theatricals, and was a great writer of those happily exploded excrescences, called prologues and epilogues. Like Pope, Moore "lisped in numbers;" but he observes, "at what age I began to act, sing, and write, I am really unable to say." It must have been very soon, for he figures on the playbill of a private theatre, as an epilogue-writer, in the year 1790, and he tells us that he even thinks he had written something earlier than that. But he first appeared legitimately in print in the "Dublin Anthologia" of 1793, where he was welcomed as "our esteemed correspondent, T. M." In the following year he addressed a sonnet, in the same magazine, to Mr. Whyte, and—though these attempts are said to have promised no more than Byron's earliest efforts—thenceforward the poet’s vocation was fixed.

From Mr. Whyte's school he was transferred to Trinity College, Dublin; the restrictions on the Roman Catholics, in whose faith the young poet was born, having been so far modified, in 1793, as to admit of his being "among the first of the young Helots of the land who hastened to avail themselves of the new privilege, of being educated in their country's university." Here he became an earnest student, but no less zealously did he worship the—not "thankless" muse, and after this guise: "It was, I think," he says, "a year or two after my entrance into college, that a masque, written by myself, and of which I had adapted one of the songs to the air of Haydn's Spirit-song, was acted, under our own humble roof in Aungier-street, by my elder sister, myself, and one or two other young