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

but .we fear it is somewhat improbable. "An
Essay on RAert Bell's Edition of Chaucer" enCe
full homage to the f alter of English poetry. T
s ory of " Going to the Shows" presents an inn ras:
s ve warning against the dangers of over suspicion.
Whether or not it is founded on truth, as it im-
plies, the circumstances though painful are ii, t
improlsable, and serve to show the delusions some-
times encouraged by circumstantial evidence. The
tale is ingeniously told, as the reader is left in
doubt until near the conclusion as to the innocence
or guilt of the suspected party. "The Second
Paper on Beaumarchais" concludes the history of
his life and times. "Monkshood's New thok
Notes" take a review of Dean Milman's " History
of L ttiu Christianity," and draws from that work
a series of historical portraits, beginning with
Hildebrand and ending with Rienzi.

LITE RATURE.

THOMAS MOORE.

Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas
Moore. Edited by the Right Hun. Lord John
Russell, M.P. Vols. I. to VI. Longman and
Company.

(SECOND NOTICE.)
It has already been remarked by us, that these
singularly readable volumes are distinguished more
especially by the twofold charm resulting from the
unton in their pages of sprightly anecdotes, and of
frequent allusions to the remarkable individuals
encountered by Moore, during his pleasant journey
through life, and here commemorated b 3 him with

a keen— sense of their peculiar and persoHal (fre-
quently, too, as it happens, of their more odd and
whimsical) characteristics. Au easy but epigram-

matic sentence, sometimes a mere passing phrase,
or casual expression, conjures up before us the
living and breathing ens of one or ether of the
Diarist's immediate contemporaries. Sketches,
they all of them are, " touched in" with the finest
and faintest strokes of the pencil possible for the
indication of the merest outline, but touched in

always with b. master hand—as in those all but
miraculous etchings of Moritz Retsch, in which
the veriest point of the artistic needle indicates by
the thinnest line imaginable the form designed by
the magical and creative fancy of the draughtsman,
and yet does this so deftly, so wondrously, so all-
sufficiently, that by a hint, as it were, every nerve,
every vein, every muscle, seems to be minutely
and individually defined. As with the wizard-
graver of Ritsch, so with the inore-than-Mivasi-
like quill of Moore. Scattering down the scrawled
notes up his journal, day by day, hotly, as the

incidents occurred, as the persons were seen,
as the words were spoken or listened to,
while everything was yet warm in his me-
mory—the poet-wit has perpetuated for us
what must otherwise have died rapidly out of the
general remembrance. An ample banquet of such
memories, moreover, the book affords from first to
last—almost from the date of Thomas Moore's

birth, on the 28th of May, 1779, in No. 12, Atm-
gier-street, at the corner of Little Longford-street,
in the city of Dublin, almost to the date of his
death, on the 26'h of February, 1852, at Sloperton
Cottage, near Devizes, in Wiltshire. A span of
nearly seventy-three years, within which Moore
tasted so many sweets and some bitterness—this
pathway studded here and there with a thorn or
two, but carpeted for the most part with flowers,
blooming and abundant. As a social favourite
Moore was for many seasons the spoilt darling of
London—of what Fanny Burney, according to

the vocabulary of her time, was so fond of calling
the ton—what Jeames, of Berkley-square, would
term the elite—the halcyon region of fashion down
which saunters for ever and ever in dwindling per-
spective, epoch after epoch—the type of each—
the blood, the buck, the dandy, and the swell !
Fascinated by his wit, his grace, his melodious and
exquisite sensibility, every bewitching attribute of
his genius, people forgot, somehow, that old John
Moore kept a little wine store once upOn a time,
somewhere in the Irish capital—they lost all recol-
lection, apparently, that Tom Moore himself was
one of those unfortunate persons who happen to
have uo great-grandfather ! They only remembered
Anacreon first of all, and then the Melodies, and
then " Lalla Itqokh," and heard all the while the
" voice of the charmer" singing as hc alone could
sing his own songs of the heart, in his own music,
to his own accompaniment. The glamour of his
singing these songs of his, was a thing onto heard