and a good deal of his time henceforth is occupied in secking materials in every possible quarter. Among others he visits Dr. Parr, of whom he gives a lively picture in his diary, and the most pointed anecdote about whom is that of his "cutting the throat of his first wife's picture one day, when she irritated him very much by destroying his favourite cat." It was not until July of the next year that a legal judgment actually passed against him in the Bermuda affair, and an attachment was on the point of being issued against his person. His friends were most anxious to come to his assistance: Leigh Hunt will sell his piano to begin a subscription; Rogers has 500l. at his service; Lord Lansdowne volunteers to become his security; Lord Tavistock is very poor, but would willingly sacrifice something to be of use to him; Lord John offers the future editions of his Life of Lord Russell. Moore declines these and all other offers: Longmans are willing to advance him any sum necessary on the mortgage of his future industry, and on his industry and abilities alone he resolutely decides to rely. Meanwhile, after some irresolution in his choice of a retreat, he decides to take refuge in Paris, in the hopes of forcing his opponents to some compromise. Accordingly, in September he left England in company with Lord John Russell, whom he proposed to accompany in a tour to Italy.

During their short stay in Paris, the most amusing thing he saw was Suard's tomb at Père la Chaise. "At the bottom of the inscription over him is, Il attend son amie; somebody wrote, Qu'il attende." Further we learn little of importance. He eats ices, sees pictures, dines, and goes to the play or the opera. This is characteristic of him, he always goes to the theatre wherever he is; he was a man who even in London could habitually go to the theatre, and sup after it; he could continue doing that; he did it at the age of forty,-when Bessy came up from Wiltshire for one day, to take a last farewell before he went abroad, he took her to Astley's to see "the high-mettled racer;" and all the time he is abroad, wherever there is an opera or a stage of any kind, he makes a point of visiting it. He is not at all select in his taste in such matters. On one occasion, Bessy and he took "dear Anastasia to the theatre of M. Comte, where we saw an extraordinary old man eat whole walnuts, and a crawfish, and a bird, and an eel, all alive."

His journey over the Alps he seems to have enjoyed greatly. The ordinary aspects of natural scenery had little attraction for him; but the novelty and magnificence of the great sights to which he was now introduced produced a strong, though passing effect on his impressible nature. You see men of this sort: they are like a jelly; they tremble all over at what would little

move most people, and yet receive no permanent impressions. It is only when the scene is before him, or yet perfectly fresh in his memory, that he can do it justice; and his prose descriptions of the moment are infinitely superior to his poetical reproductions. For the latter he preferred, he candidly tells us, to rely on the impressions of others. He always read up for his poetry; but his brief prose memoranda, written while the excitement is yet fresh, are remarkable for the vividness with which they convey the character of the scene and the emotions it was calculated to stir. On one occasion, returning from a visit to Ferney, he

"Saw Mont Blanc, with its attendant mountains, in the fullest glory, the rosy light shed on them by the setting sun, and their peaks rising so brightly behind the dark rocks in front, as if they belonged to some better world, or as if Astræa was just then leaving the glory of her last footsteps on their summits: nothing was ever so grand and beautiful.”

Again:

"27th. Arrived at Brieg, at the foot of the Simplon; an orientallooking little place, with its spires and towers. Ascended the Simplon, which baffles all description. A road, carried up into the very clouds, over torrents and precipices; nothing was ever like it. At the last stage, before we reached the barrier on the summit, walked on by myself, and saw such a scene by sunset as I shall never forget. That mighty panorama of the Alps, whose summits there, indistinctly seen, looked like the top of gigantic waves, following close upon each other; the soft lights falling on those green spots which cultivation has conjured up in the midst of this wild scene; the pointed top of the Jungfrau, whose snows were then pink with the setting sun;—all was magnificent to a degree that quite overpowered me, and I alternately shuddered and shed tears as I looked upon it. Just, too, as we arrived near the snows on the very summit the moon rose beautifully over them, and gave a new sort of glory to the scene."

Of his visit to Byron at Venice he has given an account in the Life; and his diary furnishes no additional details worth noting, unless it be a very direct expression on the part of Byron of the opinion he really seems to have held as to Shakespeare. "What do you think of Shakespeare, Moore? I think him a damned humbug." From Venice he went to Rome, where he is characteristically enraptured with Canova and Chantrey, and sits to Bartolini for his bust; thence he passed to Florence and elsewhere, and returned to Paris before the end of the year. As there seemed no chance of his Bermuda business being settled, he sent for Bessy and his children, and went to meet them at Calais-a piece of conjugal attention which he is told disgusts all Paris.

Moore, of course, saw a great many pictures in Italy. He

took little interest in them at first: really good pictures require an active imagination to enjoy them. He, as usual, is passive; but where there is obvious sentiment to rouse his feelings his admiration is at once engaged.

"Went to the Brera: some fine pictures; particularly one by Guercino, of Abraham and Agar; by far the most striking picture I ever saw. Never did any woman cry more beautifully than Agar, and the hope that lingers still amidst her sorrow is deeply affecting; in short, it attains the si vis me flere effectually, and brought the tears into my eyes as I looked at it."

Elsewhere he says:

"To a real lover of nature, the sight of a pretty woman, or a fine prospect, is beyond the best painted pictures of them in the world. Give, however, the due admiration to the chefs-d'œuvre of art, of Guido, Titian, Guercino."

Not to question his selection of the three greatest painters, what would he have thought of one who should say, that to a real lover of nature the warbling of a thrush, or the babbling of a running brook, is preferable to the most consummate productions of the greatest composers? He would have said, justly enough, such a one had no power of appreciating music; and this was his own case in painting. But though with no insight into the art, he liked to learn about it, as he did about most things. He begins by speaking with contempt of connoisseurs in painting, and ends in becoming a most determined one himself. He is always very honest about his opinions, however, and never affects to admire either Raphael or Michael Angelo. He says, the "Last Judgment" of the latter is "a strange jumble to be called sublime.'

Having settled down in Paris for the winter, he occupied himself with a set of poems originally intended to form part of a "Fudge Family in Italy;" but on consideration, and in the lack of sufficiently good spirits, he gave up the comic part; and at a later time the detached fragments were published under the title of Rhymes on the Road. Among them are some of his best lines. He commenced, too, an Egyptian poem, which was afterwards exchanged for the prose story of The Epicurean, and now appears in an unfinished form appended to that story. By degrees, however, his engagements absorbed his energies, and his whole time appears to have become devoted to a round of genuine Parisian gaiety. One day goes the same way as another: he goes to fêtes, balloon-ascents, fireworks, down the cars at the Beaujou, any where; he dines with some of his legion of acquaintance, or makes up a party for Beauvilliers or the Rochez de Cancalle, and spends the evening at the Opera, the Français, the Gymnase, or

the Variétés,-even at the Porte St. Martin, to see Madlle. Bégrand in Suzanna; then ice at Tortoni's, or supper and brandyand-water, according to the season and the company; and so to bed at two in the morning. In the autumn of 1821, he ventured to England disguised by a pair of moustachios, and while there had the satisfaction of finding his Bermuda business settled, and that the amount he had to pay was reduced to 740%. In November he returned to his old life at Paris; but seems to have got a little more writing done. One day he even had time to moralise: "7th. Dined by myself at the Trois Frères, and found great pleasure in the few moments of silent repose it gave me. Never did I lead such an unquiet life: Bessy ill, my house uncomfortable, anxious to employ myself in the midst of distractions, and full of remorse in the utmost of my gaiety."

In June 1822, after returning from a short visit to England, he begins a poem called the Three Angels, afterwards published as the Loves of the Angels, which he has finished before his final return to England in November. He concludes his Paris residence in character, with a dinner given him by his Irish friends there, at which, if we may judge of them by the snatches he reports in his diary, he made some very ornamental and indifferent speeches. In December the Angels appear, and Tom Moore is astonished to find that a British public, which could swallow Little's Poems by an effort, ascribes blasphemy to a work which he flattered himself was the most moral of all his productions, and that there is a vast deal of mournful head-shaking over it. The wretched author, who would not for the world touch the sensitive theolo gical antennæ of the British public, is all dismay. However, the book sells, which is the main thing, and in revising for the fifth edition, a happy thought strikes him. He proposes to Longmans to "make the angels' completely Eastern, and thus get rid of that connection with the Scriptures which they fear will in the longrun be a drag on the popularity of the poem." The Longmans say, "Your idea is the very thing;" and the next entry in the diary begins somewhat dolefully. "Turned over my D'Herbelot, &c., for the project of turning the poor Angels into 'Turks.' Lord Lansdowne thinks this a false step, as an avowal that the first plan was wrong; but Longmans, and they know best,-press for the alteration, and maintain that it will materially serve the author and his future works with the public. So poor Moore gets together Prideaux's Life of Mahomet, and Beausobre's Manicheism, and Hyde's Religio Persarum, and Philojudæus, and Martin's Travels, and sets to work at notes to unscripturalise these loving angels of his,-on whom one of his Dublin readers passes so wicked a criticism. "I could not help figuring to myself," says Kyle, the Provost, "all the while

999

I was reading it, Tom, Jerry, and Logic, on a lark from the sky."

In May 1823 he published his Fables of the Holy Alliance, being assured that, though they might expose him to prosecution, no jury would convict. Denman advises that

"The plaintiff will be hissed;

My lords the judges laugh, and you're dismissed."

So much safer is it in England to libel the Government than to offend Exeter Hall. In the summer he went a tour in Ireland with Lord Lansdowne, and spent the next winter and spring partly in town and partly at Sloperton, always restlessly running about, and busy with Sheridan's Life, various songs, and the Life of Captain Rock, a work for which his late visit in Ireland helped to furnish the materials.

This book he published in April 1824. It is an historical résumé of the misgovernment of Ireland, with a more detailed attack on the Irish Church and the system of tithes. It met with considerable success, more perhaps than it really deserved. Moore's is not a kind of pleasantry that easily allies itself with serious subjects. Sydney Smith's humour comes as a strong enforcer of his arguments. Moore's wit is like a varnish spread over the dryness of his details, or like sugar given with medicine to make it go down. It gives an air of levity, instead of being, as humour often is, only another form of earnestness. The attempt to write in the assumed character of Captain Rock is very raggedly and flimsily maintained, and altogether the work can claim to be little more than a clever selection of one-sided facts. It is one of those books which, as you read it with a temper willing enough to be convinced, suggests at every turn how much there must be to be said on the other side, and what evident pains are taken to keep it out of sight. The book, however, no doubt did good service by attracting a wide public attention to the anomalous position and unjust exactions of the Irish Church, with which it dealt well and forcibly. In May came the intelligence of Lord Byron's death, and the grand fracas about his memoirs, which seems to have absorbed Moore too much to leave much room for regret at the loss of his friend. In October 1825 he published the Life of Sheridan, which had so long been occupying his attention. The task was one for which in many respects he was well suited. His biographies are industriously-collected and well-told bodies of fact; but he has not the power of conveying any very vivid idea of the personality of his subject, and the filagree of his fancy is often very much out of place. His was a mind formed to deal with facts not connected by principles, but by the motives and characters of living men; and few