Trust me, Lichfield swan, you do.
Miss Seward. Ode, dramatic, epic, sonnet,
Mr. Hayley, you’re divine!
Mr. Hayley. Ma’am, I’ll give my word upon it,
You yourself are all the Nine.
Moore, as became a poet of ardent temperament, wrote the most gallant album verses of his day; for which reason, and because his star of fame rode high, he endured sharp persecution at the hands of admiring but covetous friends. Young ladies asked him in the most offhand manner to “address a poem” to them; and women of rank smiled on him in ballrooms, and confided to him that they were keeping their albums virgin of verse until “an introduction to Mr. Moore” should enable them to request him to write on the opening page. “I fight this off as well as I can,” he tells Lord Byron, who knew both the relentlessness of such demands and the compliant nature of his friend. On one occasion Lady Holland showed Moore some stanzas which Lord Holland had written in Latin and in English, on the subject of a snuff-box given her by Napoleon; bidding him imperiously “do something of the kind,” and adding that she greatly desired a corresponding tribute from Lord Byron. Moore wisely declined to make any promises for Byron (one doubts whether the four lines which that nobleman eventually contributed afforded her ladyship much pleasure), but wrote his own verses before he was out of bed the next morning, and carried them to Holland House, expecting to breakfast with its mistress. He found her, however, in such a captious mood, so out of temper with all her little world, that, although he sat down to the table, he did not venture to hint his hunger; and as no one asked him to eat or drink, he slipped off in half an hour, and sought (his poem still in his pocket) the more genial hospitality of Rosset’s restaurant. Had all this happened twenty years earlier, Moore’s self-esteem would have been deeply wounded; but the poet was by now a man of mark, and could afford to laugh at his own discomfiture.
Moore’s album verses may be said to make up in warmth what they lack in address. Minor poets—minims like William Robert Spencer—surpassed him easily in adroitness; and sometimes won for themselves slender but abiding reputations by expressing with consummate ease sentiments they did not feel. Spencer’s pretty lines beginning,—
Too late I stayed,—forgive the crime!
Unheeded flew the hours:
How noiseless falls the foot of time