stery about his origin. His
father, John Moore, was a small grocer and liquor-shop keeper who
received later the place of barrack-master from a patron of his son. The
mother, Anastasia Codd, was a Wexford girl, and seems to have been well
educated and somewhat above her husband in station. Thomas was sent to
several private schools, where he appears to have attained to some
scholarship and to have early practised composition in the tongue of
the hated Saxon. When he was fourteen, the first measure of Catholic
Emancipation opened Trinity College to him, and that establishment, "the
intellectual eye of Ireland" as Sir William Harcourt has justly called
it, received him a year later. The "silent sister" has fostered an
always genial, if sometimes inexact, fashion of scholarship, in which
Moore's talents were well suited to shine, and a pleasant social
atmosphere wherein he was also not misplaced. But the time drew near to
'98, and Moore, although he had always too much good sense to dip deeply
into sedition, was, from his sentimental habits, likely to run some risk
of being thought to have dipped in it. Although it is certain that he
would have regarded what is called Nationalism in our days with disgust
and horror, he cannot be acquitted of using, to the end of his life, the
loosest of language on subjects where precision is particularly to be
desired. Robert Emmet was his contemporary, and the action which the
authorities took was but too well justified by the outbreak of the
insurrection later. A Commission was named for purifying the college.
Its head was Lord Clare, one of the greatest of Irishmen, the base or
ignorant vilifying of whom by some persons in these days has been one of
the worst results of the Home Rule movement. It had a rather comic
assessor in Dr. Duigenan, the same, I believe, of whom it has been
recorded that, at an earlier stage of his academic career and when a
junior Fellow, he threatened to "bulge the Provost's eye." The oath was
tendered to each examinate, and on the day before Moore's appearance
Emmet and others had gone by default, while it was at least whispered
that there had been treachery in the camp. Moore's own performance was,
by his own account, heroic and successful: by another, which he very
fairly gives, a little less heroic but still successful. Both show
clearly that Clare was nothing like the stage-tyrant which the
imagination of the seditious has chosen to represent him as being.