glass was circulating too freely. At the memorable dinner of the
Literary Fund, at which the good Prince Albert presided, (on the 11th of
May, 1842,) the two poets, Campbell and Moore, had to make speeches. The
author of the "Pleasures of Hope," heedless of the duty that devolved
upon him, had "confused his brain." Moore came in the evening of that
day to our house; and I well remember the terms of true sorrow and
bitter reproach in which he spoke of the lamentable impression that one
of the great authors of the age and country must have left on the mind
of the royal chairman, then new among us.

It is gratifying to record, that the temptations to which the great
lyric poet, Thomas Moore, was so often and so peculiarly exposed, were
ever powerless for wrong.

Moore sat for his portrait to Shee, Lawrence, Newton, Maclise, Mulvany,
and Richmond, and to the sculptors Ternerani, Chantrey, Kirk, and Moore.
On one occasion of his sitting, he says,--"Having nothing in my round
potato face but what painters cannot catch,--mobility of character,--the
consequence is, that a portrait of me can be only one or other of two
disagreeable things,--_caput mortuum_, or a caricature." Richmond's
portrait was taken in 1843. Moore says of it,--"The artist has worked
wonders with unmanageable faces such as mine." Of all his portraits,
this is the one that pleases me best, and most forcibly recalls him to
my remembrance.

I soon learned to love the man. It was easy to do so; for Nature had
endowed him with that rare, but happy gift,--to have pleasure in giving
pleasure, and pain in giving pain; while his life was, or at all events
seemed to be, a practical comment on his own lines:--

"They may rail at this life; from the hour I began it,
I've found it a life full of kindness and bliss."

I had daily walks with him at Sloperton,--along his
"terrace-walk,"--during our brief visit; I listening, he talking; he now
and then asking questions, but rarely speaking of himself or his books.
Indeed, the only one of his poems to which he made any special reference
was his "Lines on the Death of Sheridan," of which he said,--"That is
one of the few things I have written of which I am really proud." And I
remember startling him one evening by quoting several of his poems in
which he had said "hard things" of women,--then, suddenly changing,
repeating passages of an opposite character, and his saying, "You know
far more of my poems than I do