Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 / A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.

It is now generally understood that the first poetic effusion of Thomas Moore was entrusted to a publication entitled Anthologia Hibernica , which held its monthly existence from Jan. 1793 to December 1794, and is now a repertorium of the spirited efforts made in Ireland in that day to establish periodical literature. The set is complete in four volumes: and being anxious to see if I could trace the fine Roman hand of him whom his noble poetic satirist, and after fast friend, Byron, styled the young Catullus of his day, I went to the volumes, and give you the result.
No trace of Moore appears in the volume containing the first six months of the publication; but in the List of Subscribers in the second, we see Master Thomas Moore; and as we find this designation changed in the fourth volume to Mr. Thomas Moore, Trinity College, Dublin! (a boy with a black ribband in his collar, being as a collegian an ex officio man! ), we may take it for ascertained that we have arrived at the well-spring of those effusions which have since flowed in such sparkling volumes among the poetry of the day.
Moore's first contribution is easily identified; for it is prefaced by a note, dated Aungier Street, Sept. 11, 1793, which contains the usual request of insertion for the attempts of a youthful muse , &c., and is signed in the semi-incognito style, Th-m-s M—re; the writer fearing, doubtless, lest his fond mamma should fail to recognise in his own copy of the periodical the performance of her little precocious Apollo.
This contribution consists of two pieces, of which we have room but for the first: which is a striking exemplification (in subject at least) of Wordsworth's aphorism, that the child is father to the man. It is a sonnet addressed to Zelia, On her charging the author with writing too much on Love! Who Zelia was—whether a lineal ancestress of Dickens's Mrs. Harris, or some actual grown up young lady, who was teased by, and tried to check the chirpings of the little