While Patience, watching on the weedy shore, To him who doubts,-and trusts in naught but Heaven!" His scepticism, however, never extends to the fundamental axioms of faith. He speaks with some contempt of religious forms; but never of the substance of religion. He was subject to accesses of emotional piety, and seems always to have felt a religious trust in the Divine Providence, deepened by the sorrows of his later years. His attitude in matters of theological opinion is peculiar and characteristic. He liked to know about these things, and was well informed on them. He wrote an article on the Fathers in the Edinburgh Review: he published a vindication of the Roman Catholic religion. But he never cared to use his knowledge to make up his own opinions. He was born a Roman Catholic, and continued so till his death: partly from a principle of honour which made him feel it an unworthy thing to desert the religion of his parents and country; partly because he had no definite call to be any thing else. Truth of fact he was always solicitous about: truth of opinion never interested him the least. "I wish," he said, "men would oftener give us what they read than what they think." He had a lively, wellstrung intellect, a good memory, and a sound judgment as far as it went. He was very capable of forming right conclusions on matters either personal or political which came immediately before him and required no very comprehensive view; but of the investigatory mind he had no trace. As long as his watch went well, he was not a man to examine into its construction. His adhesion to the Roman Church was a very loose one. As early as at the age of eighteen he ceased to attend confession. "We are told," he says, "that such pain and humiliation are salutary to the mind, and I am not prepared to deny it, the practice of confession as a moral restraint having both sound arguments and high authority in its favour." It might be a very good thing, and it might not; for himself, he found it irksome, and let it alone. In a similar spirit he seems to have waved any practical compliance with the ceremonies and ordinances of his Church. He was not unwilling to be taken for a member of the Church of England. Lord Lansdowne, after being intimate with him for years, learns for the first time that he is a Catholic; and there is a passage in one of his prefaces in which, speaking of himself as the author of the Twopenny Postboy under the pseudonym of Mr. Brown, he seems desirous, to say the least of it, to gather all the credit of occasional conformity. "To the charge of being an Irishman, poor Mr. Brown pleads guilty, and I believe it must also be acknowledged that he comes of a Roman Catholic family: an avowal which I am aware is decisive of his utter reprobation in the eyes of those exclusive patentees of Christianity, so worthy to have been the followers of a certain enlightened Bishop Donatus, who held that God is in Africa and not elsewhere. But from all this it does not necessarily follow that Mr. Brown is a Papist, and, indeed, I have the strongest reasons for suspecting that they who say so are somewhat mistaken. Not that I presume to have ascertained his opinions upon such subjects. All I profess to know of his orthodoxy is, that he has a Protestant wife and two or three little Protestant children, and that he has been seen at church every Sunday for a whole year together, listening to the sermons of his truly reverend and amiable friend, Dr. -, and behaving there as well and as orderly as most people." On another occasion he speaks in no very measured terms of Dublin politicians and the Roman Catholic faith: "If there is any thing in the world that I have been detesting and despising more than another for this long time past, it has been those very Dublin politicians whom you so fear I should associate with. I do not think a good cause was ever ruined by a more bigoted, brawling, and disgusting set of demagogues; and, though it be the religion of my fathers, I must say that much of this vile vulgar spirit is to be traced to that wretched faith, which is again polluting Europe with Jesuitism and inquisitions, and which of all the humbugs that have stultified mankind is the most narrow-minded and mischievous: so much for the danger of my joining Messrs. O'Connell, O'Donnell, &c." From the period of his return from America to 1811 Moore continued sometimes in London, sometimes at Donnington (where Lord Moira provided him a place of country seclusion in the absence of the family), sometimes in Dublin, revolving sundry literary schemes, writing Irish melodies and songs, trying his hand at an opera, very busy under the stimulus of a failing exchequer, and very gay whether it is full or empty. His plan seems always to have been to get the money, and often to spend it, before he wrote the poem. Such an arrangement might have offered some temptations to undue procrastination or neglect to a man less scrupulously nice in fulfilling his engagements than Moore always showed himself. He has perfect confidence in his genius: it can and must yield him bread. "I hate to make a conscript of my Muse; but I cannot carry on the war without her, so to it she must go." In March 1811 he married. His wife was a Miss Dyke, of whom we only learn that she came from Kilkenny, and had appeared on the Irish stage. Moving in the society he did, Moore might, no doubt, have found an opportunity of contracting a "good" matrimonial alliance. He was not the man to attempt it. In the first place, though his tastes and principles were worldly, his heart was never so; and in the second place, his tact and good sense forbade it. He knew how at once curiously open and curiously exclusive is English aristocratic society. A man of any birth with good social abilities finds no difficulty in being admitted to the utmost freedom of intercourse: he is received with all the hospitality and courtesy of a stranger; but if he attempts to incorporate himself with the body, he is at once looked on as an interloper. He must be a man of either not very high spirit, or not very sensitive temperament, who attempts to gain a place in English society by marrying a woman in a station markedly above that in which he himself has been born and bred. Moore had too much penetration not to feel this. He chose to be independent in his choice; and a very happy lot he seems to have fallen upon. "Bessy" had a beauty which could charm the fastidious eye of Rogers, who seems to have taken to her greatly, and calls her the "Madonna della Sedia" and "Psyche." To much sweetness and softness of disposition she joined a sound judgment, and a self-control and power of endurance in emergencies which women of this constitution do not always command. She administered the supplies with infinite skill, and made Moore's home a retreat to which he could always turn from the world with perfect security for peace and happiness. Nor was he ungrateful or unregardful. Lord John Russell bears witness that, "from 1811, the year of his marriage, to 1852, the year of his death, this excellent and beautiful person received from him the homage of a lover, enhanced by all the gratitude, all the confidence, which the daily and hourly happiness he enjoyed were sure to inspire." His affections were as permanent as his emotions were transient. Indeed, all the depth that there was in his nature lay in the direction of his domestic affections. Through all the excitements and enjoyments of his London career he maintained the practice he had begun on first leaving home of writing twice a week to his mother, and a portion of all his literary gains through life was always liberally and most ungrudgingly devoted to enlarging the resources and increasing the comforts of not only his own but his wife's relations. No son ever repaid more fully or more freely the affection and care that had been spent on his early years. Nor did this conduct spring from the dictates of duty and conscious gratitude alone; his letters are full of proofs that he maintained unimpaired not only the habits, but all the freshness and spontaneous warmth of his early feelings. Perhaps this C is nowhere more clearly shown than in the sensitiveness with which he shrinks from the slightest alarm of coldness on the part of those he loves. A month or two after his marriage he writes to his mother : "It was but two days ago I got my dear father's letter about the letting of the house. If I thought for an instant that this resolution arose in any degree from any feeling of hopelessness or disappointment at my marriage, it would make me truly miserable; but I hope, and, indeed, am confident, dearest mother, that you do me the justice to be quite sure that this event has only drawn closer every dear tie by which I was bound to you; and that while my readiness to do every thing towards your comfort remains the same, my power of doing so will be, please God! much increased by the regularity and economy of the life I am entering upon. Indeed, I may be a little too alive to apprehension; but it struck me that there was rather a degree of coldness in the manner in which my dearest father's last letter mentioned my marriage; and if you knew how the cordiality and interest of all my friends has been tenfold increased since this event, you would not wonder, my darling mother, at the anxiety which I feel lest those, whom in this world I am chiefly anxious to please, should in the least degree withhold that full tribute to my conduct which my own conscience tells me I deserve, and which the warm sympathy of all my other friends has given such a happy and flattering sanction to; but I know I am (like yourself) too tremulously alive upon every subject connected with the affection of those I love, and I am sure my father by no means meant to speak coldly." His genius and his heart stand in remarkable contrast. The one, with all its brilliancy, tact and effectiveness, is in truth superficial in its character, and strikes no deep root; while the restlessness of his temperament, his sensitiveness to passing emotions, his airy gaiety and cheerful spirits, are based on real depth of affectionateness and fidelity: and hence it came that, while he supported adverse fortune and struggled through limited means with unfailing courage and cheerfulness, the gradual loss by death of all who were most dear to him,-except his wife, of every relative that he had in the world,―shattered his health and overwhelmed his spirits. Early in life he anticipated such a result. Writing to Miss Godfrey, in 1810, after the death of his uncle, he says: "I am so hourly prepared for these inroads on our social happiness, that the death of even the healthiest friend about me could scarcely, I think, take my heart by surprise; and the effect which such calamities are likely to have upon me will be seen more in the whole tenor of my life afterwards than in any violent or deep-felt grief of the moment: every succeeding loss will insensibly sink the level of my spirits, and give a darker and darker tinge to all my future hopes and feelings. This perhaps is the natural process which many a heart goes through that has to survive its dearest connections, though I rather think it is not the commonest way of feeling those events, but that, in general, the impression which they make is as short as it is keen and violent; and surely it is better to have one moment darkly blotted, with the chance of the next moment's washing it all out, than to possess that kind of sensibility which puts one's whole life into mourning." In the latter part of 1811, under circumstances not very dissimilar to those which introduced him to Jeffrey, he made the acquaintance of Lord Byron. The details we have read in the Life of Byron. Again a duel miscarried, and again a dinner at Rogers's laid the first stone in a new friendship. The relation was rather that of close intimacy than of real friendship,-at least on Moore's side. Byron does not seem to have taken any very real hold on his affections. He was fascinated by the personal charm of his conversation and demeanour, and flattered by his intimacy with the genius who occupied so conspicuous a place in the world's eye. He liked him, and had a genuine admiration for him. Still Byron was an awkward friend for a man like Moore, as studiously solicitous of the world's good opinion as his friend was at once scornfully defiant and unduly ambitious of it. Moore was always trying to restrain his friend within those limits he so well knew himself. He had anxiously studied the exact range allowed by public opinion in England. He knew it was more tolerant of vice in practice than of error in opinion. He knew its love for a scapegoat, and was sorry to see Byron associating with one so distinguished in that capacity as Shelley. He had taken the measure of Leigh Hunt's social position, and pressingly dissuaded Lord Byron from connecting himself with him in the Liberal. Leigh Hunt, it is pretty clear, was not in every respect a very agreeable man to deal with; but he was certainly very ungenerously treated by Byron, and very unjustifiably libelled by Moore. He was not a man of the world; they both were, and used their advantage somewhat cruelly. Byron more than returned Moore's regard. He said he had but one friend, Lord Clare, "and perhaps Thomas Moore." Of those wild, clever letters he used to write from abroad, partly to amuse his friends at home and partly to amuse himself at their expense, the most natural and sincere in their tone are those addressed to Moore. Byron was always gêné by the society of mere literary people. He was suspicious of their claiming equality with him on the common ground of authorship, and forgetting he was a lord. Of this there was no danger with Moore; he was used to good company, and not the man to forget social distinctions-perhaps inclined to give them an undue value; but if there was any truth in his friend's unsparing observation, "Tommy dearly loves |