That he was one of the new romantic poets, with, however, a considerable tincture of the transition school, may be readily discerned in his works: his earlier poems are full of the conceits of the artificial age. His English Bards and Scotch Reviewers reminds one of the MacFlecknoe of Dryden and The Dunciad of Pope, without being as good as either. When he began that original and splendid portrait of himself, and transcript of his travels, Childe Harold, he imitated Spenser in form and in archaism. But he was possessed by the muse: the man wrote as the spirit within dictated, as the Pythian priestess is fabled to have uttered her oracles. Childe Harold is a stream of intuitive, irrepressible poetry; not art, but overflowing nature: the sentiments good and bad came welling forth from his heart. His descriptive powers are great but peculiar. Travellers find in Childe Harold lightning glimpses of European scenery, art, and nature, needing no illustrations, almost defying them. National conditions, manners, customs, and costumes, are photographed in his verses:—the rapid rush to Waterloo; a bull-fight in Spain; the women of Cadiz or Saragossa; the Lion of St. Mark; the eloquent statue of the Dying Gladiator; "Fair Greece, sad relic of departed worth;" the address to the ocean; touches of love and hate; pictures of sorrow, of torture, of death. Everywhere thought and glance are powerfully concentrated, and we find the poem to be journal, history, epic, and autobiography. His felicity of expression is so great, that, as we come upon the happy conceptions exquisitely rendered, we are inclined to say of each, as he has said of the Egeria of Muna:
... whatsoe'er thy birth,
Thou wert a beautiful thought and softly bodied forth.
Of his dramas which are founded upon history, we cannot say so much; they are dramatic only in form: some of them are spectacular, like Sardanapalus, which is still presented upon the stage on account of its scenic effects. In Manfred we have a rare insight into his nature, and Cain is the vehicle for his peculiar, dark sentiments on the subject of religion.
Don Juan is illustrative not only of the poet, but of the age; there was a generation of such men and women. But quite apart from its moral, or rather immoral, character, the poem is one of the finest in our literature: it is full of wonderful descriptions, and exhibits a splendid mastery of language, rhythm, and rhyme: a glorious epic with an inglorious hero, and that hero Byron himself.
As a man he was an enigma to the world, and doubtless to himself: he was bad, but he was bold. If he was vindictive, he was generous; if he was misanthropic and sceptical, it was partly because he despised shams: in all his actions, we see that implicit working out of his own nature, which not only conceals nothing, but even exaggerates his own faults. His antecedents were bad;—his father was a villain; his grand-uncle a murderer; his mother a woman of violent temper; and himself, with all this legacy, a man of powerful passions. If evil is in any degree to be palliated because it is hereditary, those who most condemn it in the abstract, may still look with compassionate leniency upon the career of Lord Byron.
Thomas Moore.—Emphatically the creature of his age, Moore wrote sentimental songs in melodious language to the old airs of Ireland, and used them as an instrument to excite the Irish people in the struggle they were engaged in against English misgovernment. But his songs were true neither to tradition nor to nature; they placed before the ardent Celtic fancy an Irish glory and grandeur entirely different from the reality. Nor had he in any degree caught the bardic spirit. His lyre was attuned to reach the ear rather than the heart; his scenes are in enchanted lands; his dramatis personæ tread theatrical boards; his thunder is a melo-dramatic roll; his lightning is pyrotechny; his tears are either hypocritical or maudlin; and his laughter is the perfection of genteel comedy.
Thomas Moore was born in Dublin, on the 28th of May, 1779: he was a diminutive but precocious child, and was paraded by his father and mother, who were people in humble life, as a reciter of verse; and as an early rhymer also. His first poem was printed in a Dublin magazine, when he was fourteen years old. In 1794 he entered Trinity College, Dublin; and, although never considered a good scholar, he was graduated in 1798, when he was nineteen years old.
Anacreon.—The first work which brought him into notice, and which manifests at once the precocity of his powers and the peculiarity of his taste, was his translation of the Odes of Anacreon. He had begun this work while at college, but it was finished and published in London, whither he had gone after leaving college, to enter the Middle Temple, in order to study law. With equal acuteness and adaptation to character, he dedicated the poems to the Prince of Wales, an anacreontic hero. As might be expected, with such a patron, the volume was a success. In 1801 he published another series of erotic poems, under the title The Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little. This gained for him, in Byron's line, the name of "the young Catullus of his day"; and, at the instance of Lord Moira, he was appointed poet-laureate, a post he filled only long enough to write one birthday ode. What seemed a better fortune came in the shape of an appointment as Registrar of the Admiralty Court of Bermuda. He went to the island; remained but a short time; and turned over the uncongenial duties of the post to a deputy, who subsequently became a defaulter, and involved Moore to a large amount. Returning from Bermuda, he travelled in the United States and Canada; not without some poetical record of his movements. In 1806 he published his Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, which called down the righteous wrath of the Edinburgh Review: Jeffrey denounced the book as "a public nuisance," and "a corrupter of public morals." For this harsh judgment, Moore challenged him; but the duel was stopped by the police. This hostile meeting was turned to ridicule by Byron in the lines:
When Little's leadless pistols met his eye,
And Bow-street myrmidons stood laughing by.
Later Fortunes.—Moore was now the favorite—the poet and the dependent of the nobility; and his versatile pen was principally employed to amuse and to please. He soon began that series of Irish Melodies which he continued to augment with new pieces for nearly thirty years.