, if even they were true,
have advantageously left out; and in failing, from fear of wounding
living susceptibilities, to assert with energy that which he knew to be
the real case with Byron. More than any one, Moore experienced the fatal
influence which injures independence in aristocratic England. An
Irishman by birth, and a commoner, Moore was flattered to find himself
elevated by his talents to a position in aristocratic circles which he
owed to his talents, but which he was loath to resign. The English
aristocracy then formed a kind of clique whose wish it was to govern
England on the condition that its secret of governing should not be
revealed, and was furious with Byron, who was one of them, for revealing
their weaknesses and upbraiding their pretensions. Moore wished to live
among the statesmen and noblemen whose despotic views and bad policy
Byron had openly condemned, and among those lovely islanders in whose
number there might be found more Adelinas than Auroras, and to whom
Byron had preferred foreign beauties. Moore, in short, wished to live
with the literary men whom Byron had ridiculed in his satires, and among
the high clergy, then as intolerant as they were hypocritical, and who,
as Byron said, forgot Christ alone in their Christianity. Moore, whose
necessity it had become to live among these open revilers and enemies of
Byron, after allowing the memoirs of Byron to be burnt, because in them
some of the above-named personages were unmasked, this Moore was weak
enough not to proclaim energetically that Byron's character was as great
as his genius, but to do so only timidly. By way of obtaining pardon
even for this mite of justice to the friend who was gone, Moore actually
condescended to associate himself with those who pleaded extenuating
circumstances for Byron's temper, like Walter Scott and other poets. But
truth comes out, nevertheless, in Moore; and in the perusal of Byron's
truthful and simple letters we find him there displayed in all his
admirable and unique worth as an intellectual and a moral man. We find
him adorned with all the virtues which Heaven gave him at his birth; his
real goodness, which neither injustice nor misfortune could alter; his
generosity, which not only made him disbelieve in ingratitude, but
actually incited him to render good for evil and obliged him to own that
"he could not keep his resentments;" his gratitude for the little that
is done for him; his sincerity; his openn