page_title: The Spirit of the Age
section_title: Mr. T. Moore
hierarchical_section_title: The Spirit of the Age / Essays / Mr. T. Moore—Mr. Leigh Hunt / Mr. T. Moore
caption_attribution_description: English: Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852), an Irish poet. Français&#160;: Portrait de Thomas Moore.
context_page_description: The Spirit of the Age is a collection of character sketches by the early 19th century English essayist, literary critic, and social commentator William Hazlitt, portraying 25 men, mostly British, whom he believed to represent significant trends in the thought, literature, and politics of his time. The subjects include thinkers, social reformers, politicians, poets, essayists, and novelists, many of whom Hazlitt was personally acquainted with or had encountered. Originally appearing in English periodicals, mostly The New Monthly Magazine in 1824, the essays were collected with several others written for the purpose and published in book form in 1825.
  The Spirit of the Age was one of Hazlitt's most successful books. It is frequently judged to be his masterpiece, even "the crowning ornament of Hazlitt's career, and ... one of the lasting glories of nineteenth-century criticism." Hazlitt was also a painter and an art critic, yet no artists number among the subjects of these essays.
context_section_description: Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was an Irish-born English poet, songwriter, satirist, and writer of miscellaneous prose. He skyrocketed to fame in 1817 with his exotic poem Lalla Rookh, and his controversial biography of Byron was an immediate success. Moore's most lasting popularity came with his series of sentimental, patriotic, but well-crafted and sometimes inspired Irish Melodies (1808–34). For these, Moore set original lyrics to traditional Irish tunes, and he frequently publicly performed them himself. Some, like "The Last Rose of Summer", remained popular well into the twentieth century.
  Hazlitt devoted serious coverage to Moore's poetry in one of his January 1818 Lectures on the English Poets, an earlier lecture in which series Moore himself had attended. His opinions of some of Moore's major verse productions, particularly the highly touted Lalla Rookh, a part-prose, part-verse "Oriental Romance", were not altogether complimentary. Soon afterwards, Hazlitt published an anonymous review, mostly favourable, of Moore's sometimes lighthearted but often politically barbed satire, The Fudge Family in Paris (itself published pseudonymously, as "edited" by "Thomas Brown, the younger"), in the 25 April 1818 issue of The Yellow Dwarf, and Moore in turn presented Hazlitt with an inscribed copy of that short epistolary novel in verse.
  Hazlitt and Moore shared many left-wing political views; however, Hazlitt's critical stance against much of Moore's poetry and some of his actions later distanced the two men. One of these actions was Moore's discouraging his friend Byron from joining Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt in Hunt's new left-leaning political journal, The Liberal. Also Moore harshly criticised the personal life of one of Hazlitt's favourite writers, Rousseau, and simultaneously disparaged Rousseau's literary accomplishments, later angrily defended by Hazlitt against Moore. By the time Hazlitt came to size up Moore in his sketch in The Spirit of the Age, there was no hope of any real reconciliation.
  Hazlitt begins his sketch of Moore in The Spirit of the Age by focusing on Lalla Rookh, which had appeared in 1817, at the height of the craze for poetry about exotic locales, particularly the Near East. Although Moore had no first-hand knowledge of that region of the world, and the poem achieves its "local colour" by weaving in bits and pieces of knowledge acquired from second-hand sources, it achieved a sparkle and lush effect that had immense popular appeal, and it was an instant success. As Hazlitt notes at the outset, "Mr. Moore's poetry ... is like a shower of beauty; a dance of images; a stream of music; or like the spray of the water-fall, tinged by the morning beam with rosy light. The characteristic distinction of our author's style is this continuous and incessant flow of voluptuous thoughts and shining allusions."
  However delightful this may sometimes be, Hazlitt observes, Moore carries all to excess, to satisfy popular taste: "It has been too much our author's object to pander to the artificial taste of the age. ... Now all must be raised to the same tantalising and preposterous level. ... The craving of the public mind after novelty and effect ... must be pampered with fine words at every step—we must be tickled with sound, startled with show, and relieved by the importunate, uninterrupted display of fancy and verbal tinsel as much as possible from the fatigue of thought or shock of feeling." Individual verses may be appealing, but Moore fails to construct a satisfactory whole: "He can write verses, not a poem. There is no principle of massing or of continuity in his productions—neither height nor breadth nor depth of capacity. There is no truth of representation, no strong internal feeling [but merely] flippant forwardness and unmeaning sentimentality."
  Neither does Moore's superficial sentimentality, especially in light of the tribulations of Ireland at the time, go well with Irish patriotism in Moore's Irish Melodies, Hazlitt adds, and he gibes: "If these national airs do indeed express the soul of impassioned feeling in
caption: Thomas Moore, by unknown artist
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