Nothing was ever half so magnificent; it was privately that he ought to look after this im

in reality all that they try to imitate in the gorgeous scenery of the theatre; and I really sat for three quarters of an hour in the prince's room after supper, silently looking at the spectacle, and feeding my eye with the assemblage of beauty, splendor, and profuse magnificence which it presented. It was quite worthy of a prince, and I would not have lost it for any The prince spoke to me, as he always does, with the cordial familiarity of an old acquaintance.-i. 254-5.

consideration.

This was one of those two fêtes at the beginning of the regency to which Moore's subsequent libels make so many offensive, and, as we now see, ungrateful allusions. We see also that he had once at least dined at Carlton House.

portant business, he never took, as far as appears, any trouble about it. At last, in the spring of 1818-after fifteen years' enjoyment of the office came the real disaster, which was this: The proceeds of the sales of two or three ships and cargoes, which had been court pending an appeal; this sum Moore's condemned, were lodged in the registry of the deputy embezzled, and Moore, who had, he says, "forgotten both the deputy and tho office,' was disagreeably awakened by a demand from the injured parties to make good the deposit. What the real defalcation was is not exactly stated, but it was finally compromised for 10407. Twice or thrice that sum need not have overwhelmed a prudent man in Moore's circumstances. He was in the The prince was certainly struck with the receipt of very large sums for his works, and talents and manners of the young poet, and for immediate aid, on this occasion, Messrs. partook of Lord Moira's good will towards Longman offered to advance the whole sum on him and during Mr. Addington's adminis- his own security, and several of his private tration in 1803 their joint influence (we friends - Mr. Rogers, Mr. Jeffrey, Mr. Richspeak advisedly) procured for their protégé a ard Power, Lord John Russell, and the present very easy office in the Admiralty Court of Ber- Duke of Bedford-were anxious to enable him muda. It is no doubt to palliate Moore's sub- to have settled the affair at once. These sequent ingratitude to both his patrons that he offers his delicacy rejected, and he proceeded and his partisans, and of course Lord John, to resist the demand by dilatory proceedings take the tone of denouncing this appointment in the court. We do not understand this as "the greatest misfortune of Moore's life," kind of delicacy: would it not have been more and even of treating the kindness of his delicate, or, in plain English, more honest — early protectors as a matter of reproach. even if he had exhausted his own immediate This is altogether unfounded. We nowhere resources to have accepted temporary loans find any distinct account of the value of the from such old and affluent friends as we have office, and on the contrary there seems a named- or, still better, Messrs. Longman's studied reserve on that subject; but we see proposal in the way of business than to that both Moore and his father made close in- have not only left the claimants unpaid, but quiries into that important point, the results increased their loss by a litigious resistance? of which were so satisfactory as to induce Instead, however, of feeling either for himMoore to make a voyage to Bermuda to take self or the claimants, it appears from the possession of the post. We know that it Diary that for a year and a half- from April yielded something (i. 184 :) - and indeed 1818 to August 1819-Moore was enjoying during twelve years -the most struggling himself in his usual round of fashionable years of his life we hear no complaint of amusement, and it was not till the progress of its not being productive. On the contrary, the suit rendered delay no longer possible in 1810, he talks of his " Bermuda treasury,' "that he thought of escaping from arrest, first and expects" to receive something thence in the sanctuary of Holyrood House, but, as very shortly" (i. 245). In May 1812 he ex- the safety of that asylum was doubtful, pected" money from Bermuda," which turned finally by retiring to the Continent. out to be "money indeed!" (i. 280.) In the winter of 1813 we find him entering into a negotiation for getting an immediate advance on the credit of his coming profits (i. 369); and in December 1814 we have him acknowledging the remittance of no less a sum than 500, which he immediately invests in the funds, and glories in being "a stockholder" (ii. 58). It is just a year after the receipt of this 5007. that we find his first complaint about Bermuda -"I get as near nothing from it as possible" (ii. 88). No wonder; he had been twelve years pocketing whatever moneys his deputy chose to send him-and, though warned and advised both officially and

Why should the bounty of his royal and noble patrons be in any way made responsible for all this personal neglect and imprudence on Moore's part? They gave him an office, estimated, as we think we have heard, at 4001. a year clear profit, which-besides being as much as they had any chance of obtaining from a government with which they were not connected- was also in every way suitable to Moore's then position. It secured him a moderate income, and, being almost a sinecure, left him at liberty to dedicate his time to his literary avocations. Such is, we believe, the truth of this long misunderstood and misrepresented affair.

We must now revert to Moore's political | last to find out that politics is the only thing prospects. In 1806, all the Talents came into minded in this country, and that it is better to office, and amongst them Lord Moira. Moore, rebel against government than have nothing to with as keen an appetite for place as ever a do with it. So I am writing politics, but all I patriot had and we can say no more-is in a fear is that my former ill luck will rise up perfect fever of greedy delight. He writes to against me, and that, as I could not write love his mother, Feb. 4th, 1806without getting into

Fortune smiled-but not so bountifully as Moore anticipated. Lord Moira was only master-general of the Ordnance, an office which has little civil patronage, but he did for Moore all that he could, and more than he ought. He made his father barrack-master of Dublin, for which the old man's years and habits rendered him wholly unfit; and having in his own gift "a small appointment to give away, he proposed it to Moore himself-till something better offered" (i. 192). Moore does not say what it was, but declines it, telling his lordship he would wait till something worthier of his [sic] "generosity and my ambition should occur' (ib). Lord Moira, instead of being offended, applies to Mr. Fox for that "something worthier," and Mr. Fox seems good-naturedly to have promised compliance with his request.

You may tell my uncle and aunt of Fox's promise. Lord Moira has told me that it is one of the Irish Commissionerships that I am to have; but that these will not be arranged until those in England are settled.

Whatever the promise may have been, it and Lord Moira's influence vanished at Mr. Fox's death; and Moore, ignorant, no doubt, at the time, of the delicate situation in which Lord Moira was placed after Mr. Fox's death, never forgave his lordship for the neglect and lukewarmness to which he attributed his disappointment.

"for

so I shall not be able to write politics without getting into treason (sic). — i. 225

This, a confession more candid than delicate to be made to a tory lady, was followed up by his two political satires of " Corruption" and Intolerance," which, bitter and even personally libellous as they are, may be fairly forgiven to a papist who had lost the prospect of an Irish Commissionership by the cry of No Popery. But he still had hopes from Lord Moira, which the melancholy illness of George III. and the prospect of a new reign kept alive. On this latter subject we find in a letter of the 17th of August, 1811, a passage so discreditable that nothing but his own evidence could make us believe. He had, it seems, at that time, his silly opera of " M. P." in rehearsal at the Haymarket, and thus expresses his apprehension that the King's death might interfere with it:

I have been a good deal and loyally (sic) alarmed lest a certain catastrophe should interrupt the performances of the playhouses; but I believe there is no fear whatever, and that I may be very well satisfied if my piece is not dead and d-d before HE is (N.B. before he is dead, I mean don't mistake me). — i. 258.

He then proceeds to repeat an account of the poor king being turned loose and suffered to range blindly and frantic about his apartments at Windsor, like Polypheme in his cave," which, however," he is quite happy to find was all a fabrication" (ib). This brutal trifling with the two most awful incidents of

human nature

insanity and death — is rendered additionally painful and pitiable by the recollection that the giddy author was doomed to have his own reason quenched and his own life closed under the calamitous circumstances which he then treated so lightly.

In February, 1812, the restricted regency expired; and the prince-after an ineffectual effort to form a combined ministry, which was chiefly defeated by the dissensions and extravagant pretensions of the whigs

themselves continued Mr. Perceval's ad-.

Dissatisfied with Lord Moira and the Talents, Moore became outrageous at their successors." Fine times," he says, changing a ministry-and changing to such ministration. Moore writes to Lady Donefools too" (i. 222); the fools being inter|gal : alios Perceval, Liverpool, Harrowby, Huskisson, Palmerston, Canning, Castlereagh, Wellington! He goes down in despair to Donington Park, to vent his bile on this new ministry:

I am not [he says to Lady Donegal, 27th April, 1807] writing love verses. I begin at

In Lord Moira's exclusion from all chances of

power I see an end of the long hope of my life,
and my intention is to go far away into the
The truth is, that the politi-
country, &o..
cal events of the last few days, so suddenly
breaking up all the prospects of my life, have
sunk my spirits a little, so forgive me if I am
either unjust or ill-natured.-i. 269, 270,,

for

In an immediately following letter he states and humor. Anything that abuses a politihis own motives still more clearly -no loy-cal opponent is, no doubt, fun and humor; alty to the prince, no devotion to Lord Moira, but we should have been utterly astonished at no whiggery, no popery, no patriotism his finding no ill-nature in the Twopenny nothing but a personal speculation. He tells Post-Bag if we did not know that there are Lady Donegal that he needs no consolation, palates so disordered as not to find vinegar sour, or aloes bitter. We can only say that to our taste, and that we think of the majority of mankind, there never was a bitterer or sourer specimen of concentrated malignity; and we quite agree in the judgment passed on it by a whig- a clever man, and a personal friend of Moore - that it was 66 ribaldry not to be palliated even by its wit" and that " deep must have been the hate that prompted it; and bitterly and rancorously it was uttered." And we shall see by and by that Lord Holland himself repented him of such impolitic as well as unworthy libelling. Lord John's strange compliment to his friend's good nature puts

the truth is, I feel as if a load had been taken off me by this final termination to all the hope and suspense in which the prospect of Lord Moira's advancement has kept me for so many years. It has been a sort of Will-o'-the-wisp all my life, and the only thing I regret is, that it was not extinguished earlier, for it has led me a

sad dance.-i. 271.

But he has still another consolation:

I, thank Heaven! (and it consoles me for my poverty) am free to call a rascal a rascal wherever I meet him, and never was I better disposed to make use of my privilege.-i. 271.

That is, in plain English, "having no longer any hope of a place, I am free to become a libeller, and I mean to use my privilege."

This laudable resolution soon connected him with Holland House - where Lord Moira had become an object of suspicion, or worse, because the prince showed more reluctance "to desert Lord Moira than the rest of the party," amongst whom Lord Moira was now cvidently de trop.

Moore, already secretly dissatisfied (as we have seen) with Lord Moira, now began immediately, under Lord Holland's special auspices, that series of personal libels on the prince which made so much noise in their day, but which, when we are now obliged to look through them, appear to us to have less of wit or even gayety than we thought, and to have owed their vogue to what we may call, in the original and most appropriate meaning of the word, their scurrility. The salt of these productions was their ingratitude, irreverence, and insult against one who ought to have been in a peculiar degree exempt from them not only by the absence of every private provocation and the existence of personal obligation on Moore's part, but still more by his public station, which, besides its legal claims to respect, had one which should have been even more binding on a man of delicacy and honor that he was as helpless as a woman against such polissonnerie.

us in mind of Foote's to the Duchess of Kingston. Well, I have heard of Tartars and Brimstones, but your Grace is the flower of the one and the cream of the other." Such seem to us the cream and flowers of Moore's poetical lampoons. A more practical and conclusive commentary on Lord John's estimate of these good-natured verses is furnished by the fact, that Moore was afraid to own, and Carpenter of Bond Street, then his usual publisher, to print them; and,so the titlepage announced some obscure name, or perhaps pseudonyme, under which the poison might be safely disseminated.

This course of libelling ran on for many years, and in a spirit still more ignoble than it began. Moore might be excused for preferring Lord Holland to Lord Moira-for resenting the discountenance of the Catholic claims for sharing the sudden disappointment of his political party; but an odium in longum jacens, bad as it is, would be less discreditable than such a motive as the following, which it seems to us astonishing that Moore should have confessed even to his own

pen:

1818.

Nov. 20th. Went on with a slang epistle. It seems profanation to write such buffoonery in the midst of this glorious sunshine; but, alas! money must be had, and these trifles bring it fastest and easiest.

Dec. 17th.-Twenty lines more. This sort of stuff goes glibly from the pen. I sometimes ask myself why I write it; and the only answer I get These showers of garbage, flung in news-is, that I flatter myself it serves the cause of polipapers at the sovereign, as if he had been a tics which I espouse, and that, at all events, it criminal in the pillory, Moore in 1813 col- brings a little money without much trouble. — ii. lected, with some additional lampoons, in a 240. little volume called The Twopenny Post-Bag. One of Lord John Russell's rare notes-and a rare one this is assures us that this Post-Bag "is full of fun and humor, without ill-nature' (i. 331). We will not dispute Lord John's taste as to what he may think fun

The first, certainly the most remarkable, and artistically, we think, the best, was a parody on the letter (Feb. 15, 1812) of the prince to the Duke of York, explanatory of his motives for retaining his father's ministry,

whose measures had at that important crisis of the affairs of the world been so successful, but proposing to combine with them to resist the common danger-the Whig party under Lords Grey and Grenville. The latter peremptorily declined. We do not stop to inquire whether these lords were right or wrong-Moore pronounces them decidedly wrong, because they spoiled his hopes of a place -nor do we mean to revive that or indeed any other merely political question of the day, further than to say that the prince's letter received the general assent of the country and of what was left of independence in Europe, and was the basis of that triumphant policy which led Wellington from the Tagus to the Seine, and Bonaparte from the Tuileries to St. Helena.

66

ment to write an account of the affair, saw it was indefensible, and was desirous of implicating poor Lord Moira in the blame, and so disguising a main point of the Prince Regent's case, which was, that the party had thrown Lord Moira overboard, not he them.

We know not where we could find a stronger instance of prophetic self-censure than is afforded by some lines of a satire of Moore's called The Sceptic, published in 1809, in which, with that blindness to the t quoque which so often afflicts writers of this class, he says:

ray

Self is the medium through which judgment's
Had Walcot first been pension'd by the Crown,
Can seldom pass without being turned astray.
And Paine perhaps, for something snug per ann.,
Kings would have suffered by his praise alone;
Had laughed, like Wellesley, at the Rights of Man

We forget to what phrase of Lord Wellesley's
he may have alluded, but certainly any one
who reads of his own morbid anxiety for gov-
ernment patronage and place might not un-
charitably apply the preceding line to his own
case

Moore did not trouble himself with any such considerations. He saw in the royal letter nothing but the destruction of the long hope of his life that he had been building on the prince's friendship for Lord Moira and Lord Moira's friendship for himself, and he endeavored, like other disappointed fortune-hunters, to disguise his own vexation under the cloak of patriotism. It was on or about the same day that he announced to Lady Donegal his intention to use his " privilege of libelling that this parody was read to a select conclave at Holland House, preparatory to its being published in the Morning Chronicle. would have taught his Muse a different song There is a curious sequel to this affair. We than those libels on the sovereign. Tho find in the Diary, near ten years later — poem proceeds:

1821. Nov. 2.- Lord Holland anxious to ask me about my parody on the Regent's letter, whether I had shown it to Lord Moira; heard that I had, and that Lord Moira had advised the Leaving out of some lines. Told him that none of this was true, that none had seen it before it was circulated but himself, Rogers, Perry, and Luttrel. He quoted something which he had been told Rogers had said about his (Lord H.'s) having urged me to write this, and the likelihood of my being left in the lurch after having suffered for doing so. Lord H. confessed it was all very imprudent, and that the whole conduct of the party (Whig) at that time was anything but wise, as they must know the king would never forgive the personalities they then beset him with. I should much like to know the secret of his reviving this matter just now. - iii. 297.

And four years later still

And Moore perhaps, for something snug per

ann.,

Woe to the sceptic, in these party days,
Who wafts to neither shrine his puffs of praise.
For him no pension pours its annual fruits,
No fertile sinecure spontaneous shoots.
Nor his the meed that crowned Don Hookham's
rhyme ;

Nor sees he e'er in dreams of future time
Those shadowy forms of sleek reversions rise
So dear to Scotchmen's second-sighted eyes;
Yet who that looks to History's damning leaf,
Where Whig and Tory-thief opposed to thief-
On either side, in lofty shade, are seen,
While Freedom's form hangs crucified between,
Works, 115.

&c.

Who would believe that the penman of this sneer at that eminent scholar, writer, and diplomatist, Mr. Hookham Frere, and this tirade against all placemen, was himself in possession of a "sinceure," and a " 'fertile one too, till he mismanaged and lost it by his entire neglect; that he procured for his father a place almost a "sinecure,” which the old man also mismanaged and lost; that his own life was passed in dreams of reversions as "dear "" as any Scotchman ever entertained; that when those "thieves" the

Whigs" had come into power, in 1806, he was in a bewilderment of hope and anxiety "for a place; and that he was destined to be at last "pensioned by the Crown?"

bably was not aware of the extent of Lord Moira's separation from the party in 1807which the earl subsequently told him, and authorized him to repeat.

So far we have only looked to Moore's personal relations with the prince and the patriot pretences under which he endeavored to color his libels; but we find in these volumes some elucidation of a more important matter. The So far as to the pretence of the prince's great point of Moore's attack, and that which deserting his friends. Now a word about the in a variety of shapes was urged against the principle of Catholic Emancipation, which he prince by the Whigs, was his Royal High- was also said to have deserted. It is well ness' desertion of his old political friends in known that the prince's own opinion never forming that ministry of fools in 1807. We was in favor of that question; indeed it would should not have thought it worth while to have been a strange abnegation in one whose discuss such a charge- as if great national power and station had no other basis in this interests were to be made subservient to the country than Catholic exclusion; and Moore partialities of private life- as if Prince Henry himself furnishes us with evidence, not mereought to have preferred Sir John Falstaff to ly of this adverse feeling, but of its being well Chief Justice Gascoyne- but unreasonable known to those of the prince's most intimate and unconstitutional as the indulgence of friends who took the opposite view. That such personal partialities would have been if question was first broached in the Imperial they had existed, the fact is that they did not Parliament in the spring of 1805. exist, and that the imputation against the prince's opposition to it was immediate and prince was an anachronism and a misrepre- decided. Being informed that Fox had consentation. The prince is charged with "de-sented to present the Catholic petition in the serting his old friends." Now, the plain Commons (as Lord Grenville was to do in the historic fact is, and Moore himself is forced Lords), the prince endeavored to dissuade him to attest it, that, whatever it may be called, from that step. This we learn from Fox's coolness, separation, desertion was the act of answer to Sheridan, who conveyed the prince's the party and not of the prince. Those of wishes. Fox avowed and persisted in his inthe party who possessed especially his private tention, adding, "I am sure you know how painregard were Mr. Fox, Lord Moira and Sher-ful it would be to me to disobey any command of idan (Moore, Life of Sheridan, ii. 384). his Royal Highness, or even to act in any These composed the heir-apparent's "little manner which might be in the slightest degree senate.' His deference for Mr. Fox induced contrary to his wishes, and therefore I am not him to submit to his coalition with Lord sorry that your information came too late" Grenville, but he was "never friendly to it" (Life, ii. 334). At this time the begin(ib. ii. 383-400), so that on Mr. Fox's death, ning of May, 1805-there was no prospect as Moore himself statesof any political change; Mr. Pitt was alive. the king in good health-the Catholic quesit had not yet taken its

- Ib.

tion was new

the chief personal tie that connected the heir apparent with the party was broken its political identity has been already disturbed [by the strong party color, and had none of the presGrenville coalition]; ... and immediately after tige which in a long subsequent struggle it Mr. Fox's death his Royal Highness made acquired-there was nothing therefore at known his intentions of withdrawing from all this time to affect the sincerity of the prince's interference in politics, and expressed himself opinion, and in that opinion there is no reaas no longer desirous of being considered as a son to suspect that he ever for a moment party man- his own phrase. wavered. Shortly after this, when the Catholic question had grown to be a thorough party measure, we find (ib., ii. 364) a letter from Sheridan to the prince, in which he states the prince's position on that question to be so different from his own, that he had not liked to talk to him on the subject. This letter is undated, but it must have been two or three years before the Regency.

What possible pretence could there be, four or five years after that explicit declaration, to consider him as bound to that party?

Lord Holland himself, in 1818, confessed to Moore that Lords Grenville and Grey were to blame for the final rupture with the prince in 1812-and this he did so strongly that Moore goes on to say

All this accounts most satisfactorily for the defection of the prince, and, if anything could justify his duplicity and apostasy, it would be their arrogance and folly.-i. 184.

Moore himself was, about this time, no very zealous emancipator, and talks what we dare say he would a little later have called the language of bigotry and intolerance. He

writes to his mother in the summer of 1807:
:1

This is but a cross-grained candor; for of Dublin is again, I find, or rather still, the what duplicity and apostasy, as respects seat of wrangle and illiberal contention. friendly relations, was the prince ever ac- Roman Catholics deserve very little; and even cusod, except in this defection so "satisfac- if they merited all they ask, I cannot see how it torily accounted for"? But in justice to is in the nature of things that they could get it. Moore we must say, that at this time he pro--i. 281.