sion I added that so far from being influenced by any angry or resentful feeling towards him, it would give me sincere pleasure, if, by any satisfactory explanation, he would enable me to seek the honour of being henceforward ranked among his acquaintance."

After some further correspondence, Moore and Byron were brought together as friends at the house of Rogers; a fourth poet, Campbell, being added to the party, and thus commenced the memorable and unbroken friendship between the two greatest poets of the present century.

Moore, unlike too many Irish literary men, wrote through life as an Irishman.

Amongst the numerous tributes paid to Moore, we have seldom met with one which places our bard so prominent before the "mind's eye" as a nationalist, than the following eulogium by Furlong, at a public dinner in Dublin, in 1827, at which O'Connell presided. On that occasion, on Moore's health being proposed, Furlong being called upon, thus spoke

"It is impossible to speak of Moore in the com monplace terms of ordinary approbation-the mere introduction of his name is calculated to excite a warmer, a livelier feeling. We admire him not merely as one of the leading spirits of our time; we esteem him not merely as the eager and impassioned advocate of general liberty, but we love him as the lover of his country. We hail him as the denouncer of her wrongs, and the fearless vindicator of her rights. What a glorious contrast does he offer to the spiritless, slavish race that have preceded him.

We have had our poets, the Par

nells, the Roscommons, and other bards, distinguished and celebrated in their day; but these, Irishmen as they were, scorned even to name the ill-fated land of their birth. It remained for Moore to tread the unbeaten path, and believe it, his example will not be lost upon others. The fine mind of the nation is already unfolding itself. Irish literature is no longer unfashionable. The demand increases, and the supply is certain. There is an exuberance of talent in the country, literally a waste of genius. Justly has Ireland been called 'the Land of Song,' the very atmosphere is poetical, the breezes that play around us seem the very breathings of melody. The spirits of our ancient bards are looking down, inviting the youth of the soil to participate in their glory. How could Moore, when speaking of Ireland, be otherwise than poetical? how could he touch on such a subject without catching an added spirit of inspiration? Ours is, indeed, a country worth loving-worth struggling for-aye, worth dying for. Who can

look on it with indifference? The land of the beautiful and the brave, the land of the minstrel, the saint, and the sage; the home of all that is lovely and endearing

"Green are her hills in richness glowing,

Fair are her fields, and bright her bowers;
Gay streamlets thro' her glens are flowing,
The wild woods o'er her rocks are growing;
Wide spread her lakes amidst laughing flowers,
Oh! where's the Isle like this Isle of ours ?'

Such has been the source of Moore's inspiration." Notwithstanding the versatility of Moore's powers, there was one department of literature in which

he failed.

In 1811 he appeared before the public
The piece which he produced

as a dramatic writer.
was called " M.P., or the Blue Stocking." It was
a species of opera. It was quite unsuccessful,
although it contained some very pleasing songs.
"Young Love lived once in an humble shed,"
Cupid's Lottery," and some other well-known
productions occur in this operetta.

It was in connection with this performance that Moore and Leigh Hunt became acquainted. Hunt, as editor of the "Examiner," had complimented some of Moore's poems, and the latter was anxious to procure from the critic a favourable notice of his first effort in dramatic literature. Hunt and Moore were friends for some time, but they fell out afterwards, when Byron, at Moore's instance, withdrew from a publication called "The Liberal,” with which Hunt and Hazlitt were connected. We have neither space nor inclination to pursue the unpleasant episode of the quarrel of two such men as Leigh Hunt and Moore any further.

It is not a little extraordinary that Moore should have failed in dramatic writing, for he was not only creative in his imagination, but was practically acquainted with the drama. He was one of the best actors of whom the (now historic) private theatre of Kilkenny could boast. Moore's article in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1827, on the history of private theatricals, shows how intimately he was acquainted with dramatic literature. In this paper Moore gives a very interesting account of private theatricals, dwelling with especial attention on those at Kilkenny, in which Grattan and Flood took a prominent part.

The following tribute from the Edinburgh Review, to the powers of Moore, are so honourable both to the subject and the writer, that we think the reader should share with us the pleasure their perusal gave us :

"The fame of Thomas Moore is interwoven with the misfortunes of his country. However multiform his accomplishments, and various the paths by which he has risen to his elevated reputation, that portion of his celebrity is not the least precious and enduring, which is derived from "The Melodies," where music, adapted beyond all other to the expression of national woe, was wedded to verse of an incomparable sweetness. The beautiful airs, which are supposed to have been produced by grief, and possess so admirable an aptitude for the language of lamentation, were turned by Mr. Moore to a noble account. He made them the vehicles of those delightful effusions, in which the most graceful diction, the most harmonious versification, and the most brilliant fancy were employed to charm the ear, and to touch the heart with the calamities of Ireland. A new sort of advocacy was instituted in her cause, and in the midst of gilded drawing-rooms, and the throng of illumi -nated saloons, there arose a song of sorrow, which breathed an influence as pure and as enchanting as the voice that ravished the senses of Comus with its simple and pathetic melody. The character and tendency of Mr. Moore's powers, we, in common with many others, misconstrued at his outset; his mode of life, and habits of mind and thinking, ever involving him actively in the vortex of the existing world, and in the controversies as well as

gaieties of the day, have made many unwilling to recognise his real position in the rank of poets, from hostility or prejudice, and many more from real inability to conceive the power of genius to live on the agitated surface of society, as well as on the most tranquil lake which ever was haunted by the Muses; he whom many pronounced at first too trifling to succeed, and then too successful in his own day to abide the test of another, but whose position in the brilliant band of poets of his age, (now so rapidly vanishing from us one by one and unreplaced,) is already fixed beyond the power of criticism or of time-unrivalled in one exquisite department of his art, delightful in many."

Moore was, perhaps, too good-natured to be a critic. We find, however, that where he thought censure deserved he applied it. In the Edinburgh Review for September, 1814, there is a review of the poems of a certain Lord Thurlow, in which a very severe castigation is administered to the noble poet. We subjoin the following as a specimen of Moore's "cutting-up" style:

"Our modern heroes, poetical as well as military, are endowed with a rapidity of motion and achievment which keeps gazettes and reviews continually on the alert. Indeed, so difficult do we critics find it to keep pace with the celeritas incredibilis' of some of our literary Cæsars, that we think it would not be amiss if each of those poetical chieftains had a reviewer appointed expressly aupres de sa personne, to give the earliest intelligence of his movements, and to do justice to his multifarious enterprises. The poems of Lord Thurlow-whose prowess in this way is most alarmingly proved by