The Sun.
London, England, 1856-04-21 00:00:00

THOMAS MOORE.

(FOLTRTII NOTICE.)

Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas
Moore. Edited by the Right Hon. Lord John
Russell. Vols. I. to VI. Longman and Co.
It has been rather seriously objected to Moore
by those who have the readiest eye for the detec-
tion of anything at all bearing the faintest sem-
blance of a blemish in the character of a great
celebrity, that the pet of fashion was a bit
of a tufthunter. He has been accused of
sycophancy, of toadeating, of all manner of
mean and grovelling tricks of obsequiousness.
And these same swarming little despicable imps of
depreciation seem to have sprung into being as un-
accountably and surprisingly as the electric insects
apparently called into existence by the late Mr.
Cross during the course of some of the more eccen-
tric of his galvanic experiments. Miserable
little gnats of slander summoned into life, as far
as we can at all understand, by one casual. phrase
incidentally introduced here and there' 'in the
course of the Diary—little hobgoblin devils of :Tire
conjured up by the utteranceofoneaccidentalabraea-
dabra ! The simplest thing in the world it happens
to be, when looked at for two seconds dispassion-
ately. As we will very briefly, but very clearly
demonstrate. Observe !—here is an instance—a
case in point—the microscopic origin of all this
monstrous hubbub of vituperation. Moore happens
to jot down in his Diary (for example), under date
20th June, 1828—such little "flies in amber " in the
way of personal memoranda, as—" Bessy [Mrs.
Moore]came to town at twelve to pay visits, &c. . . .
Found Lady Davy and Lady Charlemont at home :
went thence to Lady Rancliffe's and the Granards,
where we were let in also." Where "we were
let in !"—there is the whole gist of the charge
about toadeating, tufting, sycophancy, obse-
quiousness—there is the gravamen of the
whole of these sneering depreciations of Moore
as a.parvenu secretly worshipping the haut ton and
the pur sang of the aristocracy. When a little
candid consideration would have shown, almost on
the instant, how preposterous such deductions
from a phrase so trivial really are, under the cir-
cumstances. " Let in "—why the phrase was as
common in those days as the familiar greeting
in the streets of "How-d'ye-do ?'' from a passing
acquaintance. In her own contemporary Diary
Madame D'Arblay, for instance, uses the phrase
more than once as a matter of course—talking
about being "let in" or about "nut being let
in" as the case chanced to be in reference
to the round of morning visits. But Moore's own
Diary, the very Diary from which this wretched little
trumped-up accusa;iou of meanness takes its ri,e,
may furnish us readily enough with proof positive as
to the folly of the imputation. Turning to the date
of May 20th, 1823—a date which w;li be found at
Vol. iv., p. ti6—the reader will perceive Moore writ-
ing quite innocently as to auy of the gabble about
the significance for good or evil of the wording of
these poor little hoine-memorabilia—" Iu return-
ing from a saunter to Chitto [Chitway] Val-
ley, met Lady L. [Lansdowne], and Lord
Kerry ; who had walked to call at the
eottßssy being,agee[llour said, aesown
they cot agsle ]e
asleep.
.So much
bat were not LET
ix,for
tins trash about tufthunting on the part
of Moore, a charge- 'springing out of two
of dre simplest words postdble, used by him
according to the fashionable slang of the day in
the most natural, littler jaunty, fribbling way im-
aginable. But then. as Macaulay has admirably
said in one of his inimitable Essays (the one
on "Frederic the Great"), there are " those
abject natures, whose delight is in the agonies of
powerful spirits, and iu the abasement of immortal
names !" And so Thomas Moore has, in his turn,
of late, been paying posthumously the penalty of
his wide and enviable reputation. Fortunate
for him at least (with his sensitive nature) that be
has had to pay it for the most part only posthu-
inously.

It is the penalty, perhaps, also of his literary pec-
cadilloes—of sins against good taste, some of them
even worse than mere peccadilloes. Say, for instance,
those abominable, erratic, prurient, sensuous, sen-
sual, "Poetical works of the late Thomas Little,
Esq. ;" of which, however, the noble editor of
these memoirs can find it in his heart to talk thus
leniently :—" 1 will not enter into the question of
the propriety of Moore's earlier poems. Horace is
very licentious, yet his Odes are the delight of our
clerical instructors and solemn critics. Prior is not
very decent, but his tales are pra.isedon a monument
iu Westminster Abbey, and defended by our great
moralist, Dr. Johnson. Some of Little's Poeins
should never have been written, far less published,
but they must now be classed with those of other
amatory poets, who have allowed their fancy to
roam beyond the limits which Morality and decorum
would prescribe." They were his literary wild-
' oats—sown betimes in his "hot youth when George
the Third was King," only to be thought of, we
may be sure, at least long afterwards, with feelings
of remorseful repentance. Moore thought better of
Poetry in time than to render it merely the vehicle
for animal passion and animal spirits. As he thought
better in time too of wedlock : of which he wrote
flippantly in 1807, while yet a bachelor, "I don t
know which would put use into the greatest purga-
tory, matrimony or physic"—lte who afterwards
(the cynical sneers of Mr. J. W. Croker, neverthe-
less notwithstanding) live t during so many years a
life of pure domestic. happint-ss: However, in these
immature years Moore could err in grdminar as in
judgment—mistaking an adjective for au adverb—
when he wrote from London, in the April of 1807,
to his mother : " The time flies over me here as
swift as if I was in the midst of dissipation.'' Very
soon, however, he had to brush up both grammar
and judgment, and to bestir htinsetf in earnest as a
literary adventurer. And he did so, we all know,
to very general admiration. His industry, as well
as his skill, had to be manifested—for had he not to
gather name and fame out of the winds that blow,
honey out of the flowersof Pat nassus and money out
of the waters of the literary Pactol us ? Competing
with such rivals in those glorious games of the
poetic amphitheatre ! Scarcely is he arrived in
London in 1799 than he is writing about " this
wonderful Pizarro of Sheridan's, which is putting
all London into fevers 1" A dozen years later he
is observing in a letter to the same correspondent—
" My friend Lord Byron's poem is doing wonders,
and there is nothing talked of but him everywhere;
he certainly is * If" then come the most irri-
tating asterisks in the world, followed by a curt
intimation in brackets to the effect that
" [the rest of the letter has been lost."'
Again, in the year following he tells us, through
the same channel " I had a lively letter from Lord
Byron yesterday, his last thing (!), the Giaour, is
very much praised, and deservedly so ; indeed I
think he will dethrone Walter Scott." Sometimes,
in truth, he cannot help remarking with a pang
about the monopoly of renown in the world of
letters shared by those twin giants of Romance and
Poetry, as where he says " It is rather discourag-
ing now to write, when the attention of all the
reading world is absorbed by two writers—Scott
and Byron ; and when one finds such sentences as
the following in the last Edinburgh Review;
These novels (Scott's) have thrown evidently into
the shade all contemporary prose, and even all
recent poetry, except perhaps those inspired
by the genius or demon of Byron.'" Yet
Moore, in spite of all such casual heartaches and
occasional misgivings, contrived to earn " golden
opinions," both figurative and substantial, frcm his
contemporaries. Did he not out of that. subject of
" Rogers's suggestino. Lalla Rookh" obtain in
one haul 3,0001. sterlinge from the munificent firm
of the Messrs. Longman ? Was he not pleasantly,
and, as he himself tells us, " particularly flattered"
by praise from Leigh Hunt, conveyed through his
" Feast of the Poets," spread pretty much about
the same time ? Was he not himself amused by
the magnificent offer of Lucien Bonaparte's
poem to translate an offer which he declin-
ed ! Not every day did he meet with a genial
hearty open-handed fellow like " friend Doug-
las" on the morrow of obtaining a comfort-
able legacy of 10,0001. left him by the re-
cently deceased Duke of Queensbury, and who
could then and there say to him with a slap-on-the-
back sort of flourish " Now, my dear little fellow,
you know I'm grown rich : there is (sic) at present
seven hundred pounds of mine in Coutts's bank ;
here is a blank cheque which you may fill up
while I am away for as much of that as you
may want." A high-flown offer of bounty
which, of course, Moore never accepted. Hard
cash, indeed, coming in from his publishers freely
enough to render him generally independent of
such gratuitous and incidental assistance. Ren-
dering it needless for him, moreover, to resort to
the comical shift ascribed by him in a mood of
delightful waggery to a ridiculous poetaster among
his college acquaintances—of whom saith Moore,
with a twinkling laugh in his eye—" Whenever
he found himself hard run for money—which
was not unfrequently, I believe, the caae—
his last • and great resource, after having
tried all other expedients, was to threaten
to publish his poems ; on hearing which menace
the whole of his friends flew instantly to his re-
lief." Another while we may illustrate more at
large the abundant evidence . afforded by Moore's
" Diary and Correspondence" of his exquisite sense
Of' the ludicrous, of the charm of which the last-
mentioned anecdote, we take it, is of itself suffi-
ciently indicative. Enough for our purpose at this
moment if we again refer to the various interest
excited in our imagination as we glance through
-tWae gay and animated' -• pagefl
eye- over the leaves fraught with such singular
wacellawoolia ontertqamolit. Notin at

; one moment with lifted eyebrows and
shrugged-up shoulders, Moore's mention, in 1816,
of a letter, then recently received from Lord Byron,
in which that eccentric being writes, " There is
not existing a better, a brighter, or more amiable
creature than Lady Byron"—and to which Byron's
future biographer appends these two bewildered
queries,—" Is not this odd ? What can be the
reason of the separation ?" Another, while we
have from him in 1818, the latest news about the
premature death of poor Monk Lewis, while mak-
ing a voyage across the ocean, Moore telling us
that it was occasioned by Lewis taking emetics
(contrary to advice) for sea sickness. It is curious,
moreover, to hear through him from Lord Holland,
that " Air. Fox thought Sheridan's Westminster
Hall speech trumpery, and used to say it spoiled the
style of Burke, who was delighted with it"—Moore
who seems to have thought by the way that he him
self spoke very well indeed ! backing up my Lord
Holland's record of Mr. Fox's opinion, by declaring
flippantly for his own part, in regard to Sheridan's
Begum Phillippic "Certainly, in the report I have
read of it, it seems most trashy b imbast." In com-
pensation, however, for all this silly stuff in depre-
ciation of the great orator, we find in this same
volume (vol. iii.) preserved for us the following de-
lightful memento of Sherry's ready recog*tion, in
spite of himself, of his son's genius as a humorist.
The occasion is thus, so to speak, stenographically
related by the biographer of the Orator-Drama-
tist-Statesman :—" Sheridan, the first time he me-
Tom, after the marriage of the latter, seriously a.ngr‘
with him ; told him he had made his will, and had
cut him off with a shilling. Tom said he was, indeed,
very sorry, and immediately added, ' You don's
happen to have the shi!ling about you now, sir, ck
you ?' Old S. burst out a-laughing, and they be-
came friends again." We don't doubt in the lease
but that both Tom and Richard Brinsley would
together have "burst out a-laughing" had the
overheard Moore's own remark about the Lore
Chamberlain's office recorded in his Diary just be-
fore his mention of this anecdote about the shil-
ling. Having had occasion to observe tha
"At the Chamberlain's office all the plays
sent to the licenser since the time this
office was first instituted are preserved"
saith Moore—" What a hell of the damned it must
be !" With the cracking of which diabolical
joke, we take our leave yet again for a while of
the comic cicerone of the " Fudge Family," the
purloiner of the " Twopenny Post Bag," the his,
torian of " Captain Rock," the Times' Epigram-
matist, the wag who called himself, even when a
boy (Don't you remember it ?) ridiculously
" Trismegistus Rustifustius !"

SPORTING NOTES.