America, composing large numbers of easy poems. In October 1804 he was
back in England, still voyaging at His Majesty's expense, and having
achieved his fifteen months' trip wholly on those terms. Little is heard
of him for the next two years, and then the publication of his American
and other poems, with some free reflections on the American character,
brought down on him the wrath of _The Edinburgh_, and provoked the
famous leadless or half-leadless duel at Chalk Farm. It was rather hard
on Moore, if the real cause of his castigation was that he had offended
democratic principles, while the ostensible cause was that, as Thomas
Little, he had five years before written loose and humorous verses. So
thinks M. Vallat, with whom we are not wholly disposed to agree, for
Jeffrey, though a Whig, was no Democrat, and he was a rather strict
moralist. However, no harm came of the meeting in any sense, though its
somewhat burlesque termination made the irreverent laugh. It was indeed
not fated that Moore should smell serious powder, though his courage
seems to have been fully equal to any such occasion. The same year
brought him two unquestioned and unalloyed advantages, the friendship of
Rogers and the beginning of the Irish Melodies, from which he reaped not
a little solid benefit, and which contain by far his highest and most
lasting poetry. It is curious, but by no means unexampled, that, at the
very time at which he was thus showing that he had found his right way,
he also diverged into one wholly wrong--that of the serious and very
ineffective Satires, "Corruption," "Intolerance," and others. The year
1809 brought "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" with a gibe from
Byron and a challenge from Moore. But Moore's challenges were fated to
have no other result than making the challenged his friends for life.
All this time he had been more or less "about town." In 1811 he married
Elizabeth Dyke ("Bessy"), an actress of virtue and beauty, and wrote the
very inferior comic opera of "The Blue Stocking." Lord Moira gave the
pair a home first in his own house, then at Kegworth near Donington,
whence they moved to Ashbourne. Moore was busy now. The politics of "The
Two-penny Postbag" are of course sometimes dead enough to us; but
sometimes also they are not, and then the easy grace of the satire,
which is always pungent and never venomed, is not much below Canning.
Its author also did a good deal of other work of the same kind, besides