y and unassuming, rather vulgar, very good-humoured.
We went to Strawberry Hill to-day--Moore, Ellis, Lady Georgiana,
and I. Ellis is an excellent cicerone; everything is in the state
in which old Horace Walpole left it, and just as his catalogue
and description describe it. He says in that work that he makes
that catalogue to provide against the dispersion of his
collections, and he tied up everything as strictly as possible.
Moore sang in the evening and was very agreeable the whole day.
He said that Byron thought that Crabbe and Coleridge had the most
genius and feeling of any living poet. Nobody reads Crabbe now.
How dangerous it is to be a story-teller, however agreeable the
manner or amusing the budget, for Moore to-day told a story which
he told here last week! However, they all laughed just the same,
except me, and I moralised upon it thus. Clifden is a very odd
man, shrewd and well informed, and somewhat sarcastic, but very
gay and good-humoured, fond of society and the 'Times' newspaper,
a great enemy to the Church, and chuckles over its alarms and its
dangers, but I was amused with a comical contradiction. Somebody
told a story about an erratum in an Irish paper, which said that
such a one had abjured the errors of the Romish Church and
embraced those of the Protestant, at which he was greatly
diverted, and said, 'That is just what I should have said
myself;' and to-day after dinner, all of a sudden, he said grace
(he says grace on Sunday only).

Moore gave an account this morning of his being examined in
Trinity College, Dublin, when a boy, during the rebellion. Many
of the youths (himself, and he says he is pretty sure Croker,
among the number) had taken the oath of the United Irishmen[13]
(Emmett[14] and some others who were in the College had
absconded). The Chancellor (Lord Clare) came to the College,
erected his tribunal, and examined all the students upon oath. He
asked first if they had belonged to any society of United Irish,
and, if the answer was in the affirmative, he asked whom they had
ever seen there and what had passed. Contumacy was punishable by
expulsion and exclusion from every profession. At the end of the
first day's examination Moore went home to his parents, and told
them he could not take an oath which might oblige him to
criminate others (as he should be forced to answer any question
they might choose to put), and though they were poor, and had
conceived great hopes of him, they e