ter poet
than Rogers, and, though he never reached quite the same height as
Campbell at his narrow and exceptional best, a far more voluminous verse
writer and a much freer writer of good verse of many different kinds. He
was born in Dublin on 28th May 1779; his father being a grocer, his
mother somewhat higher in social rank. He was well educated, and was
sent to Trinity College, Dublin, where he had but surmounted political
difficulties; for his time as an undergraduate coincided with
"Ninety-eight," and though it does not seem that he had meddled with
anything distinctly treasonable, he had "Nationalist" friends and
leanings. Partly to sever inconvenient associations, partly in quest of
fortune, he was sent to London in that year, and entered at the Temple.
In a manner not very clearly explained, but connected no doubt with his
leaning to the Whig party, which was then much in need of literary help,
he became a protege of Lord Moira's, by whom he was introduced to the
Prince of Wales. The Prince accepted the dedication of some translations
of Anacreon, etc., which Moore had brought over with him, and which were
published in 1800; while two years later the _Poems of Thomas Little_, a
punning pseudonym, appeared, and at once charmed the public by their
sugared versification and shocked it by their looseness of tone--a
looseness which is not to be judged from the comparatively decorous
appearance they make in modern editions. But there was never much harm
in them. Next year, in 1803, Moore received a valuable appointment at
Bermuda, which, though he actually went out to take possession of it and
travelled some time in North America, he was allowed to transfer to a
deputy. He came back to England, published another volume of poems, and
fought a rather famously futile duel with Jeffrey about a criticism on
it in the _Edinburgh Review_. He began the _Irish Melodies_ in 1807,
married four years later, and from that time fixed his headquarters
mostly in the country: first near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, then near
Devizes in Wiltshire, to be near his patrons Lord Moira and Lord
Lansdowne. But he was constantly in London on visits, and much in the
society of men of letters, not merely of his own party. In particular he
became, on the whole, Byron's most intimate friend, and preserved
towards that very difficult person an attitude (tinged neither with the
servility nor with the exaggerated independence of the _parvenu_) which
did