The house at Sloperton is a small, neat, but comparatively poor cottage, for which Moore paid originally the princely sum of forty pounds a year, "furnished." Subsequently, however, he became its tenant under a repairing-lease at eighteen pounds annual rent. He took possession of it in November, 1817. Bessy was "not only satisfied, but delighted with it, which shows the humility of her taste," writes Moore to his mother; "for it is a small thatched cottage, and we get it furnished for forty pounds a year." "It has a small garden and lawn in front, and a kitchen-garden behind. Along two of the sides of this kitchen-garden is a raised bank,"—the poet's "terrace-walk," so he loved to call it. Here a small deal table stood through all weathers; for it was his custom to compose as he walked, and at this table to pause and write down his thoughts. Hence he had always a view of the setting sun; and I believe nothing on earth gave him more intense pleasure than practically to realize the line,—
"How glorious the sun looked in sinking!"—
for, as Mrs. Moore has since told us, he very rarely missed this sight.
In 1811, the year of his marriage, he lived at York Terrace, Queen's Elm, Brompton. Mrs. Moore tells me it was a pretty house: the Terrace was then isolated, and opposite nursery-gardens. Long afterwards (in 1824) he went to Brompton to "indulge himself with a sight of that house." In 1812 he was settled at Kegworth; and in 1813, at Mayfield Cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. Of Mayfield, one of his friends, who twenty years afterwards accompanied him there to see it, remarks on the small, solitary, and now wretched-looking cottage, where all the fine "orientalism" and "sentimentalism" had been engendered. Of this cottage he himself writes,—"It was a poor place, little better than a barn; but we at once took it and set about making it habitable."
As Burns was made a gauger because he was partial to whiskey, Moore was made Colonial Secretary at Bermuda, where his principal duty was to "overhaul the accounts of skippers and their mates." Being called to England, his affairs were placed in charge of a superintendent, who betrayed him, and left him answerable for a heavy debt, which rendered necessary a temporary residence in Paris. That debt, however, was paid, not by the aid of friends, some of whom would have gladly relieved him of it, but literally by "the sweat of his brow." Exactly so it was when the MS. "Life of Byron" was burned: it was by Moore, and not by the relatives of Byron, (neither was it by aid of friends,) the money he had received was returned to the publisher who had advanced it. "The glorious privilege of being independent" was, indeed, essentially his,—in his boyhood, throughout his manhood, and in advanced age,—always!
In 1799 he came to London to enter at the Middle Temple. (His first lodging was at 44, George Street, Portman Square.) Very soon afterwards we find him declining a loan of money proffered him by Lady Donegal. He thanked God for the many sweet things of this kind God threw in his way, yet at that moment he was "terribly puzzled how to pay his tailor." In 1811, his friend Douglas, who had just received a large legacy, handed him a blank check, that he might fill it up for any sum he needed. "I did not accept the offer," writes Moore to his mother; "but you may guess my feelings." Yet just then he had been compelled to draw on his publisher, Power, for a sum of thirty pounds, "to be repaid partly in songs," and was sending his mother a second-day paper, which he was enabled "to purchase at rather a cheap rate." Even in 1842 he was "haunted worryingly," not knowing how to meet his son Russell's draft for one hundred pounds; and a year afterwards he utterly drained his banker to send fifty pounds to his son Tom. Once, being anxious that Bessy should have some money for the poor at Bromham, he sent a friend five pounds, requesting him to forward it to Bessy as from himself; and when urged by some thoughtless person to make a larger allowance to his son Tom, in order that he might "live like a gentleman," he writes,—"If I had thought but of living like a gentleman, what would have become of my dear father and mother, of my sweet sister Nell, of my admirable Bessy's mother?" He declined to represent Limerick in Parliament, on the ground that his "circumstances were not such as to justify coming into Parliament at all, because to the labor of the day I am indebted for my daily support." His must be a miserable soul who could sneer at the poet studying how he could manage to recompense the doctor who would "take no fees," and at his amusement when Bessy was "calculating whether they could afford the expense of a fly to Devizes."
As with his mother, so with his wife. From the year 1811, the year of his marriage,[M] to that of his death, in 1852, she received from him the continual homage of a lover; away from her, no matter what were his allurements, he was ever longing to be at home. Those who love as he did wife, children, and friends will appreciate, although the worldling cannot, such commonplace sentences as these:—"Pulled some heath on Ronan's Island (Killarney) to send to my dear Bessy"; when in Italy, "got letters from my sweet Bessy, more precious to me than all the wonders I can see"; while in Paris, "sending for Bessy and my little ones; wherever they are will be home, and a happy home to me." When absent, (which was rarely for more than a week,) no matter where or in what company, seldom a day passed that he did not write a letter to Bessy. The home enjoyments, reading to her, making her the depositary of all his thoughts and hopes,—they were his deep delights, compensations for time spent amid scenes and with people who had no space in his heart. Even when in "terrible request," his thoughts and his heart were there,—in
"That dear Home, that saving Ark,
Where love's true light at last I've found,
Cheering within, when all grows dark
And comfortless and stormy round."
This is the tribute of Earl Russell to the wife of the poet Moore:—"The excellence of his wife's moral character, her energy and courage, her persevering economy, made her a better and even a richer partner to Moore than an heiress of ten thousand a year would have been, with less devotion to her duty, and less steadiness of conduct." Moore speaks of his wife's "democratic pride." It was the pride that was ever above a mean action, and which sustained him in the proud independence that marked his character from birth to death.
In March, 1846, his diary contains this sad passage:—"The last of my five children is gone, and we are left desolate and alone. Not a single relation have I in this world." His father had died in 1825; his sweet mother in 1832; "excellent Nell" in 1846; and his children one after another, three of them in youth, and two grown up to manhood,—his two boys, Tom and Russell, the first-named of whom died in Africa in 1846, an officer in the French service; the other at Sloperton in 1842, soon after his return from India, having been compelled by ill-health to resign his commission as a lieutenant in the Twenty-Fifth Regiment.