ife.
His end was not happy. The softening of the brain, which set in about
1848, and which had been preceded for some time by premonitory symptoms,
can hardly, as in the cases of Scott and Southey, be set down to
overwork, for though Moore had not been idle, his literary life had been
mere child's play to theirs. He died on 26th February 1852.

Of Moore's character not much need be said, nor need what is said be
otherwise than favourable. Not only to modern tastes, but to the
sturdier tastes of his own day, and even of the days immediately before
his, there was a little too much of the parasite and the hanger-on about
him. It is easy to say that a man of his talents, when he had once
obtained a start, might surely have gone his own way and lived his own
life, without taking up the position of a kind of superior gamekeeper or
steward at rich men's gates. But race, fashion, and a good many other
things have to be taken into account; and it is fair to Moore to
remember that he was, as it were from the first, bound to the
chariot-wheels of "the great," and could hardly liberate himself from
them without churlishness and violence. Moreover, it cannot possibly be
denied by any fair critic that if he accepted to some extent the awkward
position of led-poet, he showed in it as much independence as was
compatible with the function. Both in money matters, in his language to
his patrons, and in a certain general but indefinable tone of behaviour,
he contrasts not less favourably than remarkably, both with the
ultra-Tory Hook, to whom we have already compared him, and with the
ultra-Radical Leigh Hunt. Moore had as little of Wagg as he had of
Skimpole about him; though he allowed his way of life to compare in some
respects perilously with theirs. It is only necessary to look at his
letters to Byron--always ready enough to treat as spaniels those of his
inferiors in station who appeared to be of the spaniel kind--to
appreciate his general attitude, and his behaviour in this instance is
by no means different from his behaviour in others. As a politician
there is no doubt that he at least thought himself to be quite sincere.
It may be that, if he had been, his political satires would have galled
Tories more than they did then, and could hardly be read by persons of
that persuasion with such complete enjoyment as they can now. But the
insincerity was quite unconscious, and indeed can hardly be said to have
been insincerity at all. Moor