At Sloperton, Moore wrote, also, his History of Ireland and the Biographies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and Lord Byron—the last the best of the three, a biography ranking with Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and Lockhart’s Life of Scott. After his “Captain Rock,” Moore published the “Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion,” in which he girds at all Protestant doctrine, with his usual power of theologic reading and pointed argument; and then gave to the world his “Epicurean;” in which he intertwines his favorite ethics of religion with the frame of a very dull story. Moore’s mind had a strong devotional tendency, and seems to revert—with a sense of its own insufficiency—to the problem of existence beyond the last scene of all that ends the strange eventful history of life. His doubtings, if he ever had any, seem to have taken ultimate refuge in Catholic orthodoxy. He was, in fact, a dutiful son of mother Church: and great was the uneasiness he exhibited, lest his friend, Lord Byron, should adopt, in all their force, the atheistical ideas of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom his lordship had become very intimate, in Italy. Moore earnestly expostulated with Byron on the project of the “Liberal” newspaper, got up by the restless Childe and supported by Hunt, Shelley, and Hazlitt. He told his lordship that such a conjunction, with such a radical purpose, was very far from respectable—not by any means respectable enough for an English nobleman to engage in.
The last productions of Moore were those light and satirical verses which appeared in the Morning Chronicle and other papers, up to 1837. They are the happiest things of their kind, in the world, and to those who can admire the gay dexterities of wit, woven into the tapestry work of rhyme, they possess an interest surviving the subjects of them. In the interweaving of pointed and witty things with the flow of colloquial phraseology, Moore has shown himself more skillful than any of his contemporaries, and no writer of the present day can match him.
A bright, sensuous, Celtic genius dies with Tom Moore. As a poet, he will be chiefly remembered for the undying melodies of his native land, with which his words are beautifully identified. His translations of Anacreon are clever school-boy exercises—very free versions and amplifications of the original, and contain many points and prettinesses which the old Cyclic bard never thought of. The juvenile and erotic songs which obtained for Moore the name of the modern Catullus, are very slight things—mere floating gossamers of literature—flashing a little in the light—“the purple light of love,” and then fading away from the general appreciation. But these songs were, nevertheless, greatly in vogue in their day, and the pathos or gayety of them found echoes in the hearts of ten thousand festive saloons. Never was the youth of any poet spent in the midst of greater incitements of love, friendship, and song, than those that solicited Moore on every side during the heyday of his years, in the high society of England. It was therefore morally impossible that his verse should be any thing but “brilliant and light,” full of all the levities and luxuries of sentiment. The real arduousness, effort, and pain of life find no expression at all in Moore. The poems respecting America and his West India voyage, exhibit his want of sympathy with republicanism, and his ceaseless longing after the grand associations and lordly homes of England. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that he found some congenial persons and things on this continent. He has recorded the enjoyment of his sojourn in our own city of “brotherly love,” where, in the society of Mr. Dennie’s family, he almost forgot he was in a republic. His recollections of Philadelphia were happy ones.
LINES WRITTEN ON LEAVING PHILADELPHIA.
Alone by the Schuylkill a wanderer roved,
And bright were its flowery banks to his eye;
But far, very far were the friends that he loved,
And he gazed on the flowery banks with a sigh.
Nor long did the soul of the stranger remain
Unblest by the smile he had languished to meet;