THOMAS MOORE.

To be the poet par excellence of Ireland, | race of impassioned poetry. You are dethe cleverest man in the cleverest nation lighted, you are dazzled; you wonder at in the world, is to hold no mean position, the rapidity of the movements, the eleand that position we claim for Thomas gance of the attitudes, the perfect selfMoore. We do not, of course, mean that command and mastery of the performer; he was by many degrees the greatest poet you cry out, "Encore, encore," but you of his day; but, for sparkle, wit, and bril- seldom weep; you do not tremble or agoliance, his country's qualities, he is un-nise; you do not become silent. Did the surpassed. The bard of the butterflies, reader ever feel the blinding and giddy he is restless, gay, and gorgeous as the effect of level winter sunbeams pouring beautiful creatures he delights to depict. through the intervals of a railing as he It would require his own style adequately went along? This is precisely the effect to describe itself. Puck putting a girdle which Moore's rapid and bickering brilround about the globe in forty minutes liance produces. Our mental optics are -Ariel doing his spiriting gently-the dazzled, our brain reels, we almost sicken Scottish fairy footing it in the moonlight, of the monotonous and incessant splenthe stillness of which seems intended to dour, "distinct but distant, clear, but ah, set off the lively and aerial motion-any how cold!" of these figures may faintly express to us the elegant activities of Moore's mind and fancy. We are never able to disconnect from his idea that of minuteness. Does he play in the "plighted clouds?" It is as a "creature of the element," as tiny as he is tricksy. Does he flutter in the sunbeam? It is as a bright mote. Does he hover over the form and face of beauty? It is as a sylph-like sprite, his little heart surcharged, and his small wings trembling with passion. Does he ever enter on a darker and more daring flight? It is still rather the flight of a fire-fly than of a meteor or a comet. Does he assail powers and potentates? It is with a sting rather than a spear-a sting small, sharp, bright, and deadly.

Our great quarrel with Moore's poetry, apart from its early sins against morality and good taste, is its want of deep earnestness and of high purpose. Not more trivial is the dance of a fairy in the pale shine of the moon, than are the majority of his poems. And, though he did belong to that beautiful family, he could not in his poetry meddle less with the great purposes, passions, and destinies of humanity. What to him are the ongoings and future prospects of what Oberon so finely calls the "human mortals?" He must have his dance and his song out. We believe that Thomas Moore was a sincere lover of his kind, and had a deep sympathy with their welfare and progress, but we could scarcely deduce this Thomas Moore was a poet by tempera- with any certainty from his serious poetry. ment, and by intellect a wit. He had Indeed, the term serious, as applied to the warmth and the fancy of the poet, his verse, is a total misnomer. Byron's but hardly his powerful passion, his high poetry has often a sincerity of anguish solemn imagination, or his severe unity about it which cannot be mistaken; he of purpose. His verses, therefore, are howls out, like the blinded Cyclops, his rather the star-dust of poetry than the agony to earth and heaven. The verse sublime thing itself. Every sentence is of Wordsworth and Coleridge is a harpoetical, but the whole is not a poem. mony solemn as that of the pines in the The dancing lightness of his motion af- winter blast; Elliott's earnestness is alfects you with very different feelings from most terrific; but Moore flits, and flutthose with which you contemplate the ters, and leaps, and runs, a very Peri, grave walk of didactic, or the stormy but who shall never be permitted to

enter the paradise of highest song, and seems wanting in Moore-namely, that

to whom the seventh heaven of invention is shut for ever.

cool concentrated malignity which inspires Juvenal and Junius. He tickles his opponent to death; they tear him to pieces. His arrows are polished; theirs are poisoned. His malice is that of a man; theirs is that of a demon. His wish is to gain a great end over the bodies of his antagonists; their sole object is to destroy or blacken the persons of their foes. His is a public and gallant rencounter; theirs a sullen and solitary assassination.

It were needless to dilate upon the beauties which he has scattered around him in this unprofitable career. His fancy is prodigious in quantity and variety, and is as elegant as it is abundant. Images dance down about us like hailstones, illustrations breathlessly run after and outrun illustrations, fine and delicate shades melt into others still finer and more delicate, and often the general effect of his verse is like that of a large tree Moore may be regarded under the four alive with bees, where a thousand sweet phases of an amatory poet, a narrative and minute tones are mingled in one hum poet, a satirical poet, and a prose writer. of harmony. Add to this, his free flow As an amatory poet, he assumed, every of exquisite versification, the richness of one knows, the nom-de-guerre of Tommy his luscious descriptions, the tenderness | Little, and, as such, do not his merits of many of his pictures, and the sunny and demerits live in the verse of Byron glow, as of eastern day, which colours the and in the prose of Jeffrey? These whole, and you have the leading features poems, lively, gay, shallow, meretricious, of his poetical idiosyncrasy. were the sins of youth; they were not, But it is as a wit and a satirist that like "Don Juan," the deliberate abomiMoore must survive. There is no "horse nations of guilty and hardened manhood. play in his raillery." It is as delicate as Their object was to crown vice, but not it is deadly. Such a gay gladiator, such to deny the existence of virtue. They a smiling murderer as he is! How small were unjustifiably warm in their tone his weapon-how elegant his flourishes and colouring, but they did not seek to how light but sinewy his arm-and how pollute the human heart itself. It was soon is the blow given the deed done reserved for a mightier and darker spirit the victim prostrate! His strokes are so to make the desperate and infernal atkeen, that, ere you have felt them, you tempt, and to include in one "wide waft" have found death. He is an aristocratic of scorn and disbelief the existence of satirist, not only in the objects, but in faithfulness in man and of innocence in the manner of his attack. Coarse game woman. Little's lyrics, too, were neutrawould not feel that fine tremulous edge lised by their general feebleness; they by which he dissects his high-bred and were pretty, but wanted body, unity, sensitive foes to the quick. We notice, point, and power. Consequently, while too, in the spirit of his sarcastic vein, they captivated idle lads and love-sick and this very probably explains its su- misses, they did comparatively little inperiority, a much deeper and heartier jury. It is indeed ludicrous, looking earnestness. When he means to be se- back through the vista of forty years, rious, he trifles; when he trifles it is and thinking of the dire puddle and that he is most sincere. His work is pother which such tiny transgressions play, his play is work. All his political produced among the critics and moralists feeling all the moral indignation he of the time; they seem actually to have possesses all the hatred which, as an dreamed that the morality of Britain, Irishman and a gentleman, he enter- which had survived the dramatists of tains for insincerity, humbug, and selfish- Queen Elizabeth's day, the fouler fry of ness in high places-come out through the veil of his witty and elegant verse. Of a great satirist, only one element

Charles II.'s playwrights, the novels of Fielding and Smollett, the numerous importations of iniquity from the Continent,

was to fall before a few madrigals and double-entendres. No; like "dewdrops from the lion's mane," it shook them off, and pursued its way. Whatever mischief was intended, little, we are sure, was done.

er but not a more successful flight. It was a tale of the "Arabian heaven;" and there is nothing, certainly, in these wondrous "thousand-and-one nights" more rich, beautiful, and dream-like in its imagination and pathos, as in those impassioned stories. But it was only a castle in the clouds, after all-one of those brilliant but fading pomps which the eye of the young dreamer sees "for ever flushing round a summer's sky." Its angels were mere winged dolls, compared to the "celestial ardours" whom Milton has portrayed, or even to those proud and impassioned beings whom Byron has drawn. In fact, the poem was unfortunate in арpearing about the same time with Byron's Heaven and Earth," which many besides us consider his finest production as

As a narrative poet, Moore aimed at higher things, and, so far as praise and popularity went, with triumphant success. His "Lalla Rookh" came forth amid great and general expectation. It was rumoured that he had written a great epic poem; that Catullus had matured into Homer. These expectations were too sanguine to be realised. It was soon found that "Lalla Rookh" was no epic-was not a great poem at all-that it was only a short series of Oriental tales, connected by a slight but exquisite framework. Catullus, though stripped of many a piece of art. Mere atoms of the rainof his voluptuous graces, and much of his false and florid taste, remained Catullus still. And the greatest admirer of the splendid diction, the airy verse, the melodramatic incident, the lavish fancy of the poem, could not but say, if the comparison came upon his mind at all, "Ye critics, say how poor was this to Homer's style! The unity, the compactness, the interest growing to a climax, the heroic story, the bare and grand simplicity of style-all the qualities we expect in the epic were wanting in "Lalla Rookh." It was not so much a poem, indeed, as a rhymed romance. Still, its popularity was instant and bound-precedes it-the mysterious sounds heard less. If it did not become a great, still, steadfast luminary in the heaven of song, it flashed before the eye of the world brief, beautiful, gorgeous, and frail—

"A tearless rainbow, such as span The unclouded skies of Peristan."

९९

And even yet, after the lapse of twenty years, there are many who, admiring the fine moral of Paradise and the Peri," or melted by the delicate pathos of the "Fire-Worshippers," own the soft seductions of "Lalla Rookh," and in their hearts, if not in their understandings, prefer it to the chaster and more powerful poetry of the age.

bow fluttering round were the pinions of Moore's angels, compared to the mighty wings of those burning ones who came down over Ararat, drawn by the loadstars which shone in the eyes of the "daughters of men," and for which, without a sigh, they "lost eternity." And what comparison between the female characters in the one poem and the two whom we see in the other, waiting with uplifted eyes and clasped hands for the descent of their celestial lovers, like angels for the advent of angels? And what scene in Moore can be named beside the Deluge in Byron; with the gloomy silence of suspense which

among the hills at dead of night, which tell of its coming-the waters rising solemnly to their work of judgment, as if conscious of its justice and grandeurthe cries of despair, of fury, of blasphemy, as if the poet himself were drowning in the surge the milder and softer wail of resignation mingling with the sterner exclamations-the ark in the distance—the lost angels clasping their lost loves, and ascending with them from the doom of the waters to what we feel and know must be a direr doom?

We have spoken already of Moore's character as a witty poet, and need only now refer to the titles of his principal The "Loves of the Angels" was a bold-humorous compositions, such as the

It is

'Fudge Family in Paris," the "Two- solely for its literary execution. penny Post-Bag," "Cash, Corn, Currency, written throughout in a clear, chaste, and Catholics." They constitute a perfect dignified, and manly manner; the critigallery of fun without ferocity, without cism it contains is eloquent and discriindecency, and without more malice than minating, and the friendship it discovers serves to give them poignancy and point. for Byron, if genuine, speaks much for its From Moore's "Life of Sheridan," we author's generosity and heart. might almost fancy that though he had lisped in numbers, and early obtained a perfect command of the language and versification of poetry, yet that he was only beginning, or had but recently begun, to write prose. The juvenility, the immaturity, the false glare, the load of forced figure, the ambition and effort of that production, are amazing in such a man at such an age. It contains, of course, much fine and forcible writing; but even Sheridan himself, in his most ornate and adventurous prose, which was invariably his worst, is never more unsuccessful than is sometimes his biographer. Perhaps it was but fitting that the life of such a heartless, faithless, though brilliant charlatan, should be written in a style of elaborate falsetto and fudge.

We must not speak of his other prose productions-his "Epicurean," "History of Ireland," &c. The wittiest thing of his in prose we have read is an article in the "Edinburgh Review" on, we think, "Boyd's Lives of the Fathers," where, as in Gibbon, jests lurk under loads of learning, double-entendres disguise themselves in Greek, puns mount and crackle upon the backs of huge folios, and where you are at a loss whether most to chuckle at the wit, to detest the animus, or to admire the erudition.

We had nearly omitted, which had been unpardonable, all mention of the "Irish Melodies"-those sweet and luscious strains which have hushed ten thousand drawing-rooms, and drawn millions of such tears as drawing-rooms shed, but We have a very different opinion in- which have seldom won their way to the deed of his "Life of Byron." It is not, breasts of simple unsophisticated huwe fear, a faithful or an honest record of manity-which are to the songs of Burns that miserable and guilty mistake-the what the lute is to the linnet-and which, life of Byron. We have heard that Dr in their title, are thus far unfortunate, MacGinn, by no means a squeamish man, that, however melodious, they are not the who was at first employed by Murray to melodies of Ireland. It was not Moore, write his biography, and had the materials but Campbell, who wrote "Erin Mavourput into his hands, refused, shrinking neen." " 'He," says Hazlitt, "has changed back disgusted at the masses of false- the wild harp of Erin into a musical hood, treachery, heartlessness, malignity, snuff-box." and pollution which they revealed. The same materials were submitted to Moore, and from them he has constructed an image of his hero, bearing, we suspect, as correct a resemblance to his character as the ideal busts which abound do to his face. When will biographers learn that their business, their sole business, is to tell the truth, or to be silent? How long will the public continue to be deceived by such gilded falsehoods as form the staple of obituaries and memoirs? It is high time that such were confined to the corners of newspapers and of churchyards. We like Moore's "Byron," not for its subject or its moral tone, but

Such is our ideal of Thomas Moore. If it do not come up to the estimate of some of his admirers, it is faithful to our own impressions; and what more from a critic can be required? We only add, that, adınired by many as a poet, by all as a wit, he was as a man the object of universal regard; and we believe there is not one who knew him but would be ready to join in the words—

"Were it the last drop in the well,
'Tis to thee that I would drink;
In that water as this wine,

The libation I would pour
Would be peace to thee and thine,
And a health to thee, Tom Moore."

EDGAR POE,

to have had the slightest tincture of religion, and he was hardly in his senses. His name was Collins. But from the lives of all the rest there is but one inference to be drawn-that poets are a very worthless, wicked set of people." This is certainly too harsh, since these lives include the names of Addison, Watts, Young, and Milton; but it contains a portion of truth. Poets, as a tribe, have been rather a worthless, wicked set of people; and certainly Edgar Poe, instead of being an exception, was probably the most worthless and wicked of all his fraternity.

We have sometimes amused ourselves by conjecturing-Had the history of human genius run differently-had all men of that class been as wise, and prudent, and good, as too many of them have been improvident, foolish, and depraved-had we had a virtuous Burns, a pure Byron, a Goldsmith with common sense, a Coleridge with self-control, and a Poe with sobriety-what a different world it had been; what each of these surpassing spirits might have done to advance, refine, and purify society; what a host of "minor prophets" had been found among the array of the poets of our own country! And yet we must say, in justice, that For more than the influence of kings, the very greatest poets have been good or rulers, or statesmen, or clergymen as well as great. Shakspere, judging him though it were multiplied tenfold-is by his class and age, was undoubtedly, to that of the "Makers" whose winged say the least, a respectable member of words pass through all lands, tingle in society, as well as a warm-hearted and all ears, touch all hearts, and in all cir- generous man. Dante and Milton we cumstances are remembered and come need only name. And these are "the humming around us-in the hours of first three" in the poetic army. Wordslabour, in the intervals of business, in worth, Young, Cowper, Southey, Bowles, trouble, and sorrow, and sickness, and on Crabbe, Pollok, are inferior but still great the bed of death itself; who enjoy, in names, and they were all, in different fact, a kind of omnipresence-whose measures, good men. And of late years, thoughts have over us the threefold indeed, the instances of depraved genius grasp of beauty, language, and music-have become rarer and rarer; so much so, and to whom at times "all power is that we are disposed to trace a portion of given" in the "dreadful trance" of their Poe's renown to the fact that he stood genius, to move our beings to their foun- forth an exception so gross, glaring, and dations, and to make us better or worse, defiant, to what was promising to become lower or higher men, according to their a general rule. pleasure. Yet true it is, and pitiful as In character he was certainly one of true, that these "Makers"-themselves the strangest anomalies in the history of made of the finest clay-have often been mankind. Many men as dissipated as "marred," and that the history of poets he have had warm hearts, honourable is one of the saddest and most humbling feelings, and have been loved and pitied in the records of the world-sad and by all. Many, in every other respect humbling especially, because the poet is ever seen side by side with his own ideal, that graven image of himself he has set up with his own hands, and his failure or fall is judged accordingly. Cowper says, in his correspondence, "I have lately finished eight volumes of Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets;' in all that number I observed but one man whose mind seems

worthless, have had some one or two redeeming points; and the combination of "one virtue and a thousand crimes" has not been uncommon. Others have the excuse of partial derangement for errors otherwise monstrous and unpardonable. But none of these pleas can be made for Poe. He was no more a gentleman than he was a saint. His heart was as rotter