referring once more to "The
Legacy" ("When in Death I shall calm recline"), an anacreontic quite
unsurpassable in its own kind. We need dwell but briefly on such pieces
as "Believe me if all those endearing young Charms," which is typical of
much that Moore wrote, but does not reach the true devil-may-care note
of Suckling, or as "By the Hope within us springing," for Moore's
war-like pieces are seldom or never good. But with "Love's Young Dream"
we come back to the style of which it is impossible to say less than
that it is quite admirable in its kind. Then after a page or two we come
to the chief _cruces_ of Moore's pathetic and of his comic manner, "The
Last Rose of Summer," "The Young May Moon," and "The Minstrel Boy." I
cannot say very much for the last, which is tainted with the unreality
of all Moore's Tyrtean efforts; but "The Young May Moon" could not be
better, and I am not going to abandon the Rose, for all her perfume be
something musty--a _pot-pourri_ rose rather than a fresh one. The song
of O'Ruark with its altogether fatal climax--

On our side is virtue and Erin,
On theirs is the Saxon and guilt--

(which carries with it the delightful reflection that it was an Irishman
running away with an Irishwoman that occasioned this sweeping moral
contrast) must be given up; but surely not so "Oh had we some bright
little Isle of our own." For indeed if one only had some bright little
isle of that kind, some _rive fidele ou l'on aime toujours_, and where
things in general are adjusted to such a state, then would Thomas Moore
be the Laureate of that bright and tight little island.

But it is alarming to find that we have not yet got through twenty-five
pages out of some hundred or two, and that the Irish Melodies are not
yet nearly exhausted. Not a few of the best known of Moore's songs,
including "Oft in the stilly Night," are to be found in the division of
National Airs, which is as a whole a triumph of that extraordinary
genius for setting which has been already noticed. Here is "Flow on thou
shining River," here the capital "When I touch the String," on which
Thackeray loved to make variations. But "Oft in the stilly Night" itself
is far above the others. We do not say "stilly" now: we have been taught
by Coleridge (who used to use it freely himself before he laughed at it)
to laugh at "stilly" and "paly" and so forth. But the most acrimonious
critic may be challenged to point out another weakness of