The Sun.
London, England, 1856-03-03 00:00:00

our door till I was much more hot and tired f

my little playfellow." A picture not without its
charm, we take it, for those who care to note the
man of genius not merely in his hours of relax t-
tion, but at moments when those hours are gilded
with the sunshine of natural affection. Times
those in regard to which Luttrell once uttered so
comically, in his ludicrous way, that delici9usly-
absurd lamentation—" How often in life we shou!d
Ike to arrest our beaux, inornetis ; should •be sa

obliged to the five minutes if they would only stop
ten .1" Nearly 30 years had to roll on, however,
from the time when Tom Moore sat under the Dub-
lin tea-table with the barrel-organ in his lap, be-
fore he tumbled in the hay with little Barbara in
front of that cbarnaing poet's-home of Mayfield
Cottage. Many parts, too, bad he to play in the
interim, during his gay,
,toilsome progress up from,
obscurity to renowr, many motley parts—not for-
getting even that a harlequin ! In strivibg to
prepare himself for which impersonation he tells
us he succeeded, at last, "by constant practice
over the rail of a tent bed," in performing most
successfully " the head foremost leap" of the hero
of pantomime. A little later (1802) and the
spangled skin of harlequin east long ago like a
glittering slough in the dear old schooldays, no

longer seems to possess any paramount attraction
as a holiday disguise for the light-hearted and
light-heeled little Patlander. For we find him
escorting a fair companion as Wowski, in the low-
comedy part of Trudge to a merry dance in Lon-
don at the Union Masquerade. A season after
(1803) and we hear of his going as Lingo to,a fete
given by ono of the West-End Clubs, and better
still, as George Cruikshank would have it, "figur-
ing away" at a Mrs. Orby Hunter's [we had almost
said at a Mrs. Leo Hunter's] in the very apt cha-
racter of " A Little Irish boy just come to Lon-
don." In recording which last impersonation,
says Moore in a letter to his mother written im-
mediately afterwards (vol. i., p. 126), " I had a
vast deal of fun !" As no doubt he had. A little

Irish boy just come to London—he was in reality
no longer: for in 1803 he was getting well into his
fifth season of Belgravian frolic. The spring of
1799 having witnessed his literal appearance in
that character when he had come up to town, seek-

in; his fortune, with a few odd guineas sowed up,
by his pro?ident mother, (i. 72) iu the waisthnud
of his pantaloons ! Already he had then passed
through a sort of irregular literary pupilage at
home, scrawling poetical inscriptions of his own
composition over the door, and in all sorts of
strange nooks and corners in his private little snug-
gery at his father's, doing all this he tells us naively
(i. 27) "in the manner, as ho flattered himself
of Shenstone at the Leasowes." Besides which he

had boldly tried his 'prentice hand as another '
Thomas the Rhymer, in such overt burlesque effu-
sions as an " Ode upon Nothing. with Notes by
Trismegistus Rustifustius !" Winning when he
was only sixteen (1795), in return for a copy. of
original verses " all out of his own lit ad."—what
he mentions briefly (i. 33) as " the fist gai ► I
ever made by that pen whisk, such as it is, has
been my sole support ever since"—a prize awar 14-d
by a Board consisting of the Provost and. Sol ior
Fellows of Trinity, in the shape of a very hand-
somely bound copy of the " Travels of Anachands.”
At the outset, notwithstanding his home-tritimphs
and college-successes, he appeav, neverth.less, to
have had no notion whatever how pltent his grey
goose-quill would prove in trans laut:ns reams of
paper and gallons of ink into gad sfte, a securer
fashion than that of the old alchemist; : fo: we
read in a letter of his, addressed to his father at the
close of the century, that he meditates publishing
_ _

a few of his " trifling poems," adding "it is more
through a wish to get rid of them than with any
hopes of emolument." Perhaps his
,views in this
respect may have become somewhat moditik d a
little while afterwards when he had oc asiM to re-
joice his mother's heart by tile goo.' ti Hal s that
he expected to clear one hundred guineas by
Anacreon ! However this may be, " clear" them
he did—and more : the open sesame was won to
the treastfres rewarding the fortunate adventurer.