of his age, Moore wrote
sentimental songs in melodious language to the old airs of Ireland, and
used them as an instrument to excite the Irish people in the struggle they
were engaged in against English misgovernment. But his songs were true
neither to tradition nor to nature; they placed before the ardent Celtic
fancy an Irish glory and grandeur entirely different from the reality. Nor
had he in any degree caught the bardic spirit. His lyre was attuned to
reach the ear rather than the heart; his scenes are in enchanted lands;
his _dramatis personae_ tread theatrical boards; his thunder is a
melo-dramatic roll; his lightning is pyrotechny; his tears are either
hypocritical or maudlin; and his laughter is the perfection of genteel
comedy.

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin, on the 28th of May, 1779: he was a
diminutive but precocious child, and was paraded by his father and mother,
who were people in humble life, as a reciter of verse; and as an early
rhymer also. His first poem was printed in a Dublin magazine, when he was
fourteen years old. In 1794 he entered Trinity College, Dublin; and,
although never considered a good scholar, he was graduated in 1798, when
he was nineteen years old.

ANACREON.--The first work which brought him into notice, and which
manifests at once the precocity of his powers and the peculiarity of his
taste, was his translation of the _Odes of Anacreon_. He had begun this
work while at college, but it was finished and published in London,
whither he had gone after leaving college, to enter the Middle Temple, in
order to study law. With equal acuteness and adaptation to character, he
dedicated the poems to the Prince of Wales, an anacreontic hero. As might
be expected, with such a patron, the volume was a success. In 1801 he
published another series of erotic poems, under the title _The Poetical
Works of the late Thomas Little_. This gained for him, in Byron's line,
the name of "the young Catullus of his day"; and, at the instance of Lord
Moira, he was appointed poet-laureate, a post he filled only long enough
to write one birthday ode. What seemed a better fortune came in the shape
of an appointment as Registrar of the Admiralty Court of Bermuda. He went
to the island; remained but a short time; and turned over the uncongenial
duties of the post to a deputy, who subsequently became a defaulter, and
involved Moore to a large amount. Returning from Bermuda, he travelled in
the United States and