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

TH

IRE

(FOURTH 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 firms of .1
depreciation seem to have sprung into being as I
accouutably and surprisingly as the electric insects
apparently called into existence by the late Mr. i
Cross dutiug the course of some of the more eccen-
tric of his galvanic experiments. Miserable
little gnats of Slander summoned into life, as far j
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 epi-e
c aujured up by the utterance of oneaceiden t al abraca-
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 vituperate n. Mo...re happens
to jot down in his Diary (to example), under date
29dt June, 1828—such little "flies in amber " in the
way of personal memoranda, as—" Bessy [Mrs.
Moore] came to town at twelve to pay v.sits, C. •
Found Lady Davy and Ltdy Cuariemont 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 toadeatmg, tufting, sycophancy, obse-
quiousnuss—tnere is the gravamen of the
whole of these sneering tlepreciatious 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 these 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 "not 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 accusation of meanness takes its rise,
mayfurnish 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.ll be found at
Vol. iv., p. 66—the reader will perceive Moore writ-
ing quite innocently as to any of the gabble about
the significance for good or evil of the wording of
these poor little home-memorabilia—" In return-
ing from a saunter to Chitto [Chitway] Val-
ley, met Lady L. [Lansdowne], and Lord
Kerry ; who had walked to call at the
cottage [Moore's own cottage] ; but were not LET
IN, Bessy being, they said, asleep. "So much for
this trash about tufthunting on the part
of Moore, a charge' springing out of two
of ,he simplest words possible, used by him
according to the fashionable slang of the day in
the most natural, little, jaunty, ftibblina 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 in the abasement of immortal
names !" And so Thomas Moore has, in his turn,
of late, bepu paying posthumously the penalty of
his wide and enviable reputation. Fortunate
for him at least (with his sensitive nature) that he
has had to pay it for the most part only posthu-
mously.
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
then-ti memoirs can find it iu his heart to talk thus
leniently I will not enter into the question of
the propriety of Moore's earlier poems. Horace is
vary licentious, yet his Odes are the delight of our
clerical instructors and solemn crimes. Prior is not
very decent, but his talesarepraisedon a monument
in Westminster Abbey, and defended by our great
muralist, Dr. Johnson. Sortie of Little's Poems
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." Toey were his literary wild-
uats—siwn betimes in his " hot youth when George
the Third was King," only to his thought of, we
may be sure, at least long afterwards, with feelings
of remorseful repentance. Moore thought better of
Poetry in tithe than to render it merely the vehicle
for animal passion and animal spirits. As 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 tue into the greatest purga-
tory, matrimony or physic"—he who afterwards
(the cynical sneers of Mr. J. W. Croker, neverthe-
less notwithstanding) live 1 during so many years a
life of pure domestic happipess. However, in these
immature years Moore could err in grammar as in
judgment—mistaking au adjective fur 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 himself 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 flowersofParnassus and money out
of the waters of the literary Pactolus ? Competing
wits 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 * * *" 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 be tells us, through
the same channel " I had a lively letter from Lord
Byron yesterday, his last thing (!), the G iaour, is
very much praised, and deservedly ; indeed I
think he will dethrone Walter Scott." Sometimes,
in truth, he cannot help remarking with a pang
about the monopoly of renown iu 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 iteview.
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 tins,giviiig,, contrived to earn " golden
opinions," both figurative and substantial, from his
contemporaries. Did he not out of that subject of
" Rogets's suggesting,"," Lalla Rookh" certain in
one haul 3,0001. sterling from the munificent firm
of the Messrs. Longman ? Was he nut 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 Bonaparto's
poem to translate —an offer which declin-
edhe
! Not every day did he meet
hearty open-handed fellow like " frieandco vri.th
.a genial
Doug-
las on the morrow of obtaining by re-
able legacy of 10,0001.
cently deceased Duke of leftQ bin" by
and who
hnnuewe with a slap-on-the-
could then and there say to
dear. little fellow, -
back sort of flourish "Now, my
there is (sic) at present
you know I'm grown rich :
seven hundred pounds
of mine Coutts'sbank in ;
here is a blank cheque which you may fill up
while I a
away for as much of that as you
may want. " m
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 case—
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 winch 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
I excited in our imagination as we glance through
these gay, and animated, pages. and run our
bye ''over tht' leaves irauglit with sach-si.ugular
size laiggall,44o9us eAte:ttgagaeut. lioug at