THOMAS MOORE.

To be the poet par excellence of Ireland, the cleverest man in the cleverest nation in the world, is to hold no mean position, and that position we claim for Thomas Moore. We do not of course mean that he is by many degrees the greatest poet at present alive; but for sparkle, wit, and brilliance, his country's qualities, he is unsurpassed. The bard of the butterflies, he is restless, gay, and gorgeous as the beautiful creatures he delights to depict. It would require his own style adequately to describe itself. Puck putting a girdle round about the globe in forty minutes-Ariel doing his spiriting gently-the Scotch fairy footing it in the moonlight, the stillness of which seems intended to set off the lively and aerial motion-any 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 66 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.

Thomas Moore is a poet by temperament, and by intelect a wit. He has the warmth and the fancy of the poet, but hardly his powerful passion, his high solemn imagination or his severe unity of purpose. His verses, therefore, are rather the star-dust of poetry than the sublime thing itself. Every sentence he writes is poetical, but the whole is not a poem. The dancing lightness of

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his motion affects you with very different feelings from those with which you contemplate the grave walk of didactic or the stormy race of impassioned poetry. You are delighted, you are dazzled; you wonder at the rapidity of the movements, the elegance of the attitudes, the perfect self-command and mastery of the performer; you cry out "Encore, encore," but you seldom weep; you do not tremble or agonise; you do not become silent. the reader ever feel the blinding and giddy effect of level winter sunbeams pouring through the intervals of a railing as he went along? This is precisely the effect which Moore's rapid and bickering brilliance produces. Our mental optics are dazzled, our brain reels, we almost sicken of the monotonous and incessant splendour, "distinct but distant, clear, but ah, how cold!"

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 is a sincere lover of his kind, and has a deep sympathy with their welfare and progress, but we could scarcely deduce this with any certainty from his serious poetry. Indeed, the term serious, as applied to his verse, is a total misnomer. Byron's poetry has often a sincerity of anguish about it which cannot be mistaken; he howls out, like the blinded Cyclops, his agony to earth and heaven. The verse of Wordsworth and Cole

ridge is a harmony solemn as that the pines in the winter blast. Elliott's earnestness is almost terrific. But Moore flits, and flutters, and leaps, and runs, a very Peri,

but who shall never be permitted to enter the paradise of highest song, and to whom the seventh heaven of invention is shut for ever.

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 alive with bees, where a thousand sweet and minute tones are mingled in one hum of harmony. Add to this his free flow of exquisite versification, the richness of his luscious descriptions, the tenderness of many of his pictures, and the sunny glow, as of eastern day, which colours the whole, and you have the leading features of his poetical idiosyncrasy.

But it is as a wit and a satirist that Moore must survive. There is no "horse play in his raillery." It is as delicate as it is deadly. He carves his foeman as a dish fit for the gods, not hews him as a carcass meet for hounds." Such a gay gladiator, such a smiling murderer as he is! How small his weapon-how elegant his flourishes-how light but sinewy his arm-and how soon is the blow given-the deed done-the victim prostrate! His strokes are so keen that ere you have felt them you have found death. He is an aristocratic satirist not only in the objects but in the manner of his attack. Coarse game would not feel that fine tremulous edge by which he dissects his highbred and sensitive foes to the quick. We notice, too, in his sarcastic vein, and this very probably explains its superiority, a much deeper and heartier earnestness. When he means to be serious he trifles, when he trifles it is that he is most sincere. His work is play, his play is work. All his political feeling—all the

moral indignation he possesses-all the hatred which as an Irishman and a gentleman he entertains for insincerity, humbug, and selfishness in high places-come out through the veil of his witty and elegant verse. Of a great satirist, only one element seems wanting in Moore, namely, that cool concentrated malignity which inspires Juvenal and Junius. He hates, they loathe. 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 publie and gallant rencounter, theirs a sullen and solitary assassination.

Moore may be regarded under the four phases of an amatory poet, a narrative poet, a satirical poet, and a prose writer. As an amatory poet he assumed, every one knows, the nom-de-guerre of Tommy Little, and as such do not his merits and demerits live in the verse of Byron and in the prose of Jeffrey? These poems, lively, gay, shallow, meretricious, were the sins of youth; they were not, like "Don Juan," the deliberate abominations of guilty and hardened manhood. Their object was to crown vice, but not to deny the existence of virtue. They were unjustifiably warm in their tone and colouring, but they did not seek to pollute the human heart itself. It was reserved for a mightier and darker spirit to make the desperate and infernal attempt, and to include in one "wide waft" of scorn and disbelief the existence of faithfulness in man and of innocence in woman. Little's lyrics, too, were neutralised by their general feebleness; they were pretty, but wanted body, unity, point, and power. Consequently, while they captivated idle lads and lovesick misses, they did comparatively little injury. It is indeed ludicrous, looking back through the vista of forty years, and thinking of the dire puddle and pother which such

tiny transgressions produced among the critics and moralists of the time; they seem actually to have dreamed that the morality of Britain, which had survived the dramatists of Queen Elizabeth's day, the fouler fry of 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 "dew-drops from the lion's mane," it shook them off, and pursued its way without impediment or pause. Whatever mischief was intended, little we are sure was done.

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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 a hum of general expectation. It was rumoured that he had written a great epic poem; that Catullus had matured into HoThese 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 of 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 boundless. 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."