cond, or third, or twentieth-hand learning in the notes makes one
smile, and the whole reminds one (as I daresay it has reminded many
others before) of a harp of the period with the gilt a little tarnished,
the ribbons more than a little faded, and the silk stool on which the
young woman in ringlets used to sit much worn. All this is easy
metaphorical criticism, if it is criticism at all. For I am not sure
that, when the last age has got a little farther off from our
descendants, they will see anything more ludicrous in such a harp than
we see in the faded spinets of a generation earlier still. But much
remains to Lalla if not to Feramorz. The prose interludes have lost none
of their airy grace. Even Mr. Burnand has not been able to make Mokanna
ridiculous, nor have the recent accounts of the actual waste of desert
and felt huts banished at least the poetical beauty of "Merou's bright
palaces and groves." There are those who laugh at the bower of roses by
Bendemeer's stream: I do not. "Paradise and the Peri" is perhaps the
prettiest purely sentimental poem that English or any other language can
show. "The Fire Worshippers" are rather long, but there is a famous
fight--more than one indeed--in them to relieve the monotony. For "The
Light of the Harem" alone I have never been able to get up much
enthusiasm; but even "The Light of the Harem" is a great deal better
than Moore's subsequent attempt in the style of "Lalla Rookh," or
something like it, "The Loves of the Angels." There is only one good
thing that I can find to say of that: it is not so bad as the poem which
similarity of title makes one think of in connection with
it--Lamartine's disastrous "Chute d'un Ange."

As "Lalla Rookh" is far the most important of Moore's serious poems, so
"The Fudge Family in Paris" is far the best of his humorous poems. I do
not forget "The Two-penny Postbag," nor many capital later verses of the
same kind, the best of which perhaps is the Epistle from Henry of Exeter
to John of Tchume. But "The Fudge Family" has all the merits of these,
with a scheme and framework of dramatic character which they lack. Miss
Biddy and her vanities, Master Bob and his guttling, the eminent
turncoat Phil Fudge, Esq. himself and his politics, are all excellent.
But I avow that Phelim Connor is to me the most delightful, though he
has always been rather a puzzle. If he is intended to be a satire on the
class now represented by the O'Briens and the McCarthys