Is to burden all that wont eat meat
With a costly Meat Establishment.”
On hearing these words so gravely said,
With a volley of laughter loud I shook:
And my slumber fled, and my dream was sped,
And I found myself lying snug in bed,
With my nose in the Bishop of Ferns’s book.
In spite of the prestige of Moore’s earlier poetry, the world has regarded him, and very justly, as a moral man and a good Catholic. In the domestic relations of life, as well as the social, he seems to have gone through the world blamelessly. For the last ten years or so of his life, he was in receipt of £300 a year from the British Government, procured for him by his friends the Marquis of Lansdowne and Lord John Russell.
Moore died on the 26th of last February, and was buried, according to his desire, in the church-yard of Bromham, between Devizes and Chippenham, where two of his children were buried before him—Anastasia Mary, who died in 1829 aged sixteen, and John Russell, who died in 1848 at the age of nineteen. Another son of the poet died in the French service at Algiers. He had, we believe, four children, all of whom passed away before himself. Doubly dark, indeed, was the close of a life begun so hopefully and enjoyed so much in its middle course.
If the poet had died in Ireland, he would have had a good funeral. As it was, but a single coach, containing four persons, went to the grave with the hearse which carried his remains. Byron reached Huckwell, in 1824, pretty much in the same way; but, we believe, with a somewhat larger attendance—not much, however. Moore attended his noble friend’s funeral to the bounds of London, as the slender cortège passed through, but went no farther.