a lord," certainly no man ever gratified this taste with less sacrifice of independence than he did.

We find in the diary contained in these volumes some fresh details as to the suppression of those memoirs of himself which Byron wrote for publication after his death; but, on the whole, Lord John thinks it wiser to suppress the details of the suppression, and endeavours to console us by the assurance that the world is no loser by the burning of these memoirs. It may be so; still, the world would have preferred to judge for itself. The only good reason against their being published (with the necessary omissions) seems to have been that Sir John Cam Hobhouse had insuperable objections against it. Hobhouse had a taste for suppression. He advised against the publication of Childe Harold; he maintained that Don Juan could not be printed; he burned the memoirs, and he was opposed to the life being written at all.

Moore, though he seems to have acted against his real judgment, under a somewhat too fastidious fear of incurring unpleasant observations, played, at any rate, a thoroughly disinterested part in the matter. Lord Byron had given him the memoirs expressly that he might sell them for his own advantage. Moore assigned the Ms. to Murray, for 20007., in Byron's lifetime. On his death, when the question arose as to the propriety of publishing it at all, he insisted on refunding the money he had received, so as to regain his control over it; and then, against his own judgment, submitted to its being burnt unread by Lord Byron's nearest relatives, and declined every proposal on the part of his family to reimburse him. This is one of many instances of a marked and honourable trait in Moore's character. No pecuniary advantage had the slightest influence to bend him from any course which to his own ideas of honour or propriety seemed the true one. And his sense of propriety was nice, and his spirit of independence high. His Life of Lord Byron is a good one, and he steered his course with much tact through the difficulties with which his task was surrounded. In the main, and considering the author's position, the picture is a sufficiently impartial one. Flattered and softened it no doubt is, and those who wish to obtain a correct idea of Byron must seek additional sources of information.

In 1812 Moore began to be famous in a vein of satire much better adapted to his genius than the heavier style he had at first adventured on. His Parody on the Prince's Letter was a light but a very sharp arrow, well feathered with fun and its point anointed with a sort of good-humoured bitterness which gave it a great charm in the eyes of the Whigs, then in the first soreness of the Prince's desertion. "I never," he writes to his

mother, "had such a flattering but embarrassing scene as yesterday. I dined at Lord Holland's, and there were the Duke of Bedford, Lord Grey, Lord Morpeth, &c. Their whole talk was about my poem, without having the least idea that I had written it: their praises, their curiosity about the author, their guesses, &c. would have been exceedingly amusing to me, if there had been no one by in the secret; but Lord Holland knew it, which made me a good deal puzzled how to act. Nothing for a long time has made such a noise." From this time forward his constant habit was to write similar little satires and jeux-d'esprit on the political points of the day, and publish them in one or other of the morning papers-a habit from which he derived no little emolument as well as amusement. No English writer has ever produced so many trifles of this kind of the same excellence. They are strictly things of the moment; and many of them are but laborious reading now, when the excitement of the hour and the absence of minute knowledge are wanting to give us the temper and the power to appreciate their full point. There are others, however, which, intimately bound up as they are with passing traits of personal character, turn upon more permanent sources of interest; and, as the author says in one of his prefaces, "their ridicule, thanks to the undying nature of human absurdity, appears to have lost as yet but little of the original freshness of its first application." Old political and social questions too are ever recurring, and every generation will find that some of the satires of a past one have been kept warm for it. Just now, for instance, "Sir Andrew Agnew" occupies as prominent a position on the stage as ever he did.

Sunday Ethics.

A SCOTCH ODE.

"Puir profligate Londoners, having heerd tell

That the De'il's got amang ye, and fearing 'tis true,
We ha' sent ye a mon wha's a match for his spell,

A chiel o' our ain, that the De'il himsel

Will be glad to keep clear of, one Andrew Agnew.

So, at least, ye may reckon, for ane day entire
In ilka lang week ye'll be tranquil eneugh,
As Auld Nick, do him justice, abhors a Scotch squire,
An' would sooner gae roast by his ain kitchen-fire
Than pass a hale Sunday wi' Andrew Agnew.

For, bless the gude mon, gin he had his own way,
He'd na let a cat on the Sabbath say 'mew;'
Nae birdie maun whistle, nae lambie maun play,
An' Phoebus himsel could na travel that day,

As he'd find a new Joshua in Andrew Agnew.

Only hear, in your Senate, how awfu' he cries,
Wae, wae to a' sinners who boil an' who stew!
Wae, wae to a' eaters o' Sabbath-bak'd pies;
For as surely again shall the crust thereof rise

In judgment against ye,' saith Andrew Agnew.
Ye may think, from a' this, that our Andie's the lad
To ca' o'er the coals your nobeelity too;
That their drives, o' a Sunday, wi' flunkies, a' clad
Like showinen, behind 'em, would mak the mon mad,—
But he's nae sic a noodle, our Andie Agnew.

If lairds an' fine ladies, on Sunday, think right
To gang to the deevil-as maist o' 'em do-
To stop them our Andie would think na polite;
And 'tis odds (if the chiel could get ony thing by't)

But he'd follow 'em, booing, would Andrew Agnew."

His earlier political squibs, including the Twopenny PostBoy, though very personal, are much better than his later ones; they have a greater completeness about them; there is a main point which the minor strokes all go to enforce, while the later ones are apt to be loose, straggling, and uneven: a good point here and there with gaps between, and the whole wanting compression and a single aim.

In March 1812, writing to Miss Godfrey, he announces his intention to live in the country upon the earnings of his brains, and be as happy as love, literature, and liberty can make him. In accordance with this resolution, he soon after settled at Keyworth. His song-writing alone was a pretty good source of income, his musical publishers, the Powers, being under an engagement to pay him 500l. a year for his songs for seven years, and as much longer as he chose to say. Before the end of the year, his last hopes from Lord Moira were destroyed by the appointment of that nobleman as Governor-General of India, and the discovery by his protégé that, after so long a time of waiting for his patron's accession to power, it afforded him when at last attained no opportunity of serving the interests of his client. Lord Moira's shyness of the subject, and something of coldness in his tone, hurt Moore, and he shows some natural soreness on this point, as well as in the complete failure of expectations which had certainly been encouraged up to the very last; but he acted with his usual spirit, declined any offers of Lord Moira to use his interest for him with ministers at home, and somewhat pointedly freed Lord Moira himself from any future claim he might still be supposed to have upon him, as it was too late for him to go on expecting.

The publication of the Twopenny Post-Boy in the beginning of 1813, and the continued success of the Irish Melodies, had raised his name very high in the literary market.

While writing these, however, his main occupation is with a long Eastern poem, on which "his whole heart and industry are at last fairly set," and in whose interests he declines an offer of Murray to instal him as editor of a new Review, like the Edinburgh and Quarterly. As is always the case with him, it is for the public he is writing, and as a mere matter of business, not from any strong internal impulse. Lalla Rookh must be finished at once, "because, anticipated as I have already been in my Eastern subject by Lord Byron in his late poem, the success he has met with will produce a whole swarm of imitators in the same Eastern style, who will completely flyblow all the novelty of my subject." In the course of this year he moved to Mayfield Cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, where he was nearer town, and out of the way of his fine friends at and in the neighbourhood of Donnington, who became expensive, as fine friends do. He doesn't find he avoids them here, however; he only exchanges the old ones for new ones. However, he works on, makes his début in the Edinburgh in a "castigation" of Lord Thurlow's poems, and before the end of the year he has concluded a negotiation with Longmans, by which they are to pay him 30007. for his forthcoming poem without their having seen a line of it. It was not published, however, till early in 1817, and the intervening time Moore spent chiefly at home, relieved by a visit to Ireland and a visit from Rogers,-always a stanch and kind friend of his, and who, on this occasion, "was particularly amiable, and took no fright at the superfluity either of melted-butter or of maids, and even saw with composure a little boy who came to clean my shoes; not that I can quite answer for his subsequent reflections on these luxuries."

In the spring of that year he moved to Hornsey, to be at hand for the publication of Lalla Rookh. On the 13th May he writes to his mother that it is still unfinished; on the 30th he tells her it is already going into the second edition; and before the end of the year the sixth has been published. Like other poets and critics, he finds it easy to castigate Lord Thurlow, but can't see by what right, criticism, when directed towards his own productions, can assume to be otherwise than adulatory, especially when he is intimate with the reviewer. "Jeffrey's article," he says, "is pretty fair, though within an inch now and then of being otherwise." In the summer he paid a flying visit to Paris, where he picked up his materials for the Fudges in Paris, which, with its companion, the Fudges in England, are perhaps the two best specimens of his wit and fun. Soon after his return he suffered a grievous loss in the death of his daughter Barbara. Hitherto he had almost entirely escaped that class of afflictions, which to his sensitive and affectionate disposition came with a

peculiar poignancy; henceforward his life was darkly chequered by them. Before the winter he made his last change of permanent residence, removing to a cottage at Sloperton, near Devizes. Here he was in the neighbourhood of Lord Lansdowne, whose library at Bowood was at his command, and from whom and Lady Lansdowne he and his wife always received the most kind and friendly attention. Another neighbour of his was Bowles, the author of those sonnets which Coleridge mentions as first awakening his love for poetry; the author too of those commentaries and pamphlets on Pope which elicited Byron's amazingly clever and absurd letters in vindication of that poet and assault on his commentators. Bowles was not that subdued man of tender sentiment the readers of his sonnets only may probably imagine him. He was an eccentric divine. Moore, who became a great friend of his, says of him, "What an odd fellow it is! and how narrowly by being a genius he has escaped being a fool! Even as it is, there seem to be some doubts among his brother magistrates." Again: "The mixture of talent and simplicity in him is delightful. His parsonage-house at Brenhill is beautifully situated; but he has a good deal frittered away its beauty with grottoes, hermitages, and Shenstonian inscriptions. When company is coming, he cries, Here, John, run with the crucifix and missal to the hermitage, and set the fountain going. His sheep-bells are tuned in thirds and fifths: but he is an excellent fellow notwithstanding; and, if the waters of his inspiration be not those of Helicon, they are at least very sweet waters, and to my taste pleasanter than some that are more strongly impregnated."

At Sloperton his first business was to write the Fudges in Paris. It was while engaged in this work, in the spring of 1818, that he received the unpleasant and-to a man in his position of less cheerful and courageous temper-almost overwhelming intelligence, that his deputy in Barbadoes had embezzled the proceeds of the sale of a ship and cargo, which had been deposited in his hands during an appeal to the Court in England; and that he, as registrar, was held responsible for the loss of a sum amounting to something like 6000l. The unfortunate poet sees before him the prospect of the King's Bench; but, though feeling the blow, he is far from being utterly cast down by it. He says, in one of his letters, "They cannot take from me either my self-respect or my talents, and I can live upon them happily any where." "It is well," said one of his friends, "you are a poet; a philosopher never could have borne it." The matter, however, remained some time pending in the Admiralty Courts. Meanwhile the Fudges prosper amazinglyfive editions in less than a fortnight—and have already put 3501. in his pocket. He now undertook to write his life of Sheridan;