On the 22nd of January, George Herbert Rodwell, the celebrated composer and writer, was removed from among the living. His musical compositions and stage productions were numerous and popular.
In the month of February, Samuel Prout, F.S.A., celebrated for his drawings in water-colours, and a peculiar style of depicting public buildings, died. Also, Dr. Murray, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, a man of extraordinary influence, acquired by prudence, moderation, patriotism, and consistency of character.
The most remarkable man who departed this life in the British Isles during 1852 was Thomas Moore, the poet. He died in his seventy-third year, at Sloperton Cottage, Wiltshire, where, through the generous patronage of Lord Lansdowne, the poet spent his most tranquil years. This extraordinary man was born in Aungier Street, Dublin, in the year 1779. The poet’s father was a grocer, but subsequently received an appointment as quarter-master to a regiment. The poetical genius of Thomas Moore was shown at a very early period of life—in his thirteenth year he contributed to the Dublin periodicals. He was at that time under the care of a very celebrated schoolmaster, Mr. Samuel Whyte, who took a deep interest in the precocious genius of his pupil, and had no small share of honour in bringing him into notice. As early as fourteen years of age he entered the Dublin University. He was scarcely more than a year a pupil in the university when he published a paraphrase on the fifth ode of Anacreon. This was so well received that he proceeded to translate the remaining odes, which performance ultimately met with a most encouraging reception. In his nineteenth year, he proceeded to London in the hope of obtaining by subscription a sufficient amount to secure the success of his “Anacreon,” and also to enter as a student the Middle Temple. The work did not appear until 1800, when, under the patronage of the Earl of Moira, he was enabled to dedicate it to the Prince of Wales. In 1802, he published a volume under the designation of, “The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little.” The moral tone of these productions offended the public taste, and inflicted injury upon the poet’s reputation which his subsequent life did not remove, even when the glory of his genius shed lustre upon his name and his country. His more popular works are well known. In politics he was a whig partizan, but was not at heart attached to any school of politics. He was ostensibly a Roman Catholic, and was intolerant as a writer in defence of Romanism, while in private he was most liberal on religious subjects, and showed no earnest belief in any system of theology. He was one of the most accomplished scholars of his day, but was not a profound thinker, and was regarded as rather a lazy writer. His imagination was not of the highest order, but it was rich and diversified. His artistic taste and harmony as a poetical writer were exquisite. His love of music and song was a deep passion. In society, he held every circle as in a spell, so charming were his conversation and manner, and so brilliant and vivacious was his wit. Lord Byron, who had so happy a power of describing a notable character in a single sentence or paragraph, said of him, “He is gentlemanly, gentle, and altogether more pleasing than any individual with whom I am acquainted.”
When Lord Melbourne was in office, in 1835, he counselled her majesty to bestow a pension on the poet of £300 a-year. Moore had found it difficult to realize this sum by his writings, as his prose works did not meet the expectations raised by his poetry. When he became a pensioner he seldom wrote, verifying the predictions of his friends. He exchanged too early in life the department of literature in which he had made so great a reputation for prose, in which he sought by memoirs, historical writing, and even controversy, to increase his income, and establish a new reputation. A passionate love for Ireland pervaded most of his writings, especially his Irish melodies. He constantly breathed a fervid wish from his earliest years for her national independence, and severance from England. Yet when a large portion of his countrymen flew to arms for that purpose, in 1798, he, although nineteen years of age, took no part in the struggle: neither did he show any desire to live in Ireland, but courted English aristocratic society, and served English party interests. During three years before his death, the brain gradually softened, and he sunk into childishness. None of his children survived him. His widow, a charming person, retained a pension of £100 a-year, conferred upon her by the government.
The poetical works of Thomas Moore retain their popularity in many lands. Not only in England, where he spent by far the greater part of his life, and in Ireland, where he was born and educated, and whose popular joys, sorrows, hopes, aspirations, traditions, and prejudices he sung so sweetly, but wherever the English language is spoken, his fame is cherished and his verse repeated. Nor is the delight inspired by his works limited to the language in which they were written. All over the continent of Europe, among the nations whose language is of Latin and Celtic origin, his muse inspires deep interest and pleasure. His extraordinary oriental poem, “Lalla Rookh,” has been translated into Persian, and delights the literary sons of Iran as it erst thrilled the imagination and heart of all persons of poetic temperament in the British Isles. In the city of Dublin, a statue has been erected to his memory, close by the old senate, now used as the Bank of Ireland, and near the poet’s Alma Mater, Trinity College. The statue is a failure, private partiality and clique interest having stifled public competition and robbed the great sculptors, and the poet, of the reward of genius, the city of Dublin of an ornament of which it might have been proud, and his country of the opportunity of paying a suitable tribute of respect to one of the most gifted of her sons. Had M’Dowell or Hogan been allowed to execute a statue for Moore, it would have been accomplished con amore, and in a way worthy of the poet and of the sculptor.
The month of February witnessed the death, at the advanced age of ninety, of John Landseer, the celebrated engraver. He left behind him three sons, all eminent—George, Charles, and Sir Edwin.
Among the deaths of remarkable persons in April was that of General Arthur O’Connor, aged eighty-nine, at the Chateau de Rignon, near Nemours. This notable person was one of the leaders in the terrible Irish rebellion of 1798. He was the third son of Roger Connor, of Connorville, by Anne Longfield, sister of Lord Longueville. He was called to the Irish bar in 1788. Lord Longueville returned him to the Irish parliament as representative of Philipstown, in the King’s County, in the year 1790. Lord Longueville afterwards deprived him of his seat in parliament, and disinherited him, by which a loss occurred to Mr. O’Connor of £10,000 a-year, in consequence of his violent advocacy, in the Irish parliament, of “Catholic emancipation.” He afterwards became a leader of the “United Irishmen,” and one of “the Directory of Five,” of that body. After various unsuccessful efforts to separate Ireland from Great Britain, he was arrested, and made an ingenious and desperate effort to escape, assisted by the Earl of Thanet. In 1804, he was deported from Ireland, his life being spared on condition, it was alleged, of some disclosures as to the plans for insurrection even then entertained by him and his colleagues. Buonaparte made him a general of division, and he subsequently received further promotion in the French army. In 1809 he married a niece of Marshal Grouchy, daughter of the Marquis Condorcet, the French mathematician. In 1834, he was permitted by Earl Grey, then in power in England, to revisit Ireland for the purpose of disposing of some property inherited by him, and which the British government had not confiscated. With the proceeds he purchased the chateau where Mirabeau was born, and there General O’Connor died. The celebrated agitator Fergus O’Connor, once member of parliament for Cork, and afterwards for Nottingham, was nephew to the general.
In May, Mrs. Coleridge, only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She was a lady of extraordinary attainments and vigour. Her acquaintance with the classics was most extensive and accurate, and by her translations from the Latin her reputation was to a great extent made. Wordsworth and Southey were her intimate friends, and intense admirers of her genius. In a review written by an eminent critic, it was remarked of her that “she was the inheritrix of her father’s genius, and almost rival of his attainments.”
In August, in his eightieth year, Thomas Thompson, M.D., F.R.S., London and Edinburgh, Regius Professor of Chemistry in the University of Glasgow, and President of the Glasgow Philosophical Society. Dr. Thompson, as a chemist and inventor, had obtained a great celebrity.
In August, the death of Joseph W. Allen, the celebrated landscape-painter, took place at Hammersmith. He was the son of a schoolmaster in that place.