The some time expected death of Thomas Moore occurred on the 26th of February, at Sloperton Cottage, near Devizes. Like Southey and Scott, the British Anacreon had for several years before his decease, quite lost his intelligence, and he lingered in seclusion, and in half slumbering unconsciousness, personally well nigh forgotten by the world. His history is little more than a history of his writings. He was deservedly popular in society, for his amiable qualities, and fascinating manners; he shared the intimacy of the greatest men and greatest writers of his age, more prolific of eminent characters than any other since that of Shakspeare, Raleigh, and Sidney; and dividing his time between the quiet charms of domestic ease, and the smiles of the most elevated classes, he may be said to have been a fortunate and happy man. As a song writer, he was doubtless unrivalled. His versification is exquisitely finished, harmonious, and musically toned. The sense is never obviously sacrificed to the sound; on the contrary, he delighted in that species of antithetical and epigramatic turn, which is generally held to excuse some roughness, and to be scarcely compatible with perfect melody of rhythm. In grace, both of thought and diction, in easy, fluent wit, in melody, in brilliancy of fancy, in warmth (but scarcely depth) of sentiment, and even in purity and simplicity, when he chose to be pure and simple, no one has been superior to Moore; but in grandeur of conception, power of thought, and above all, unity of purpose, and a high aim, he was singularly deficient, and these are necessary to the character, not of a sweet minstrel, but of a great poet.
The London Morning Chronicle furnishes a biography of Moore, which we slightly abridge. With him, says the Chronicle, is snapped the last tie, save perhaps one, represented by the veteran Rogers, which connects the present generation with the outburst of "all the talents" which signalized the opening of the century. That great kindling of genius—embracing almost all sides of imaginative literature, of criticism and philosophy—is becoming more a thing of history than of fact. Year by year, the lights are going out. Wordsworth was the last extinguished before Moore; and now, to all intents and purposes, the great galaxy which poured such a flood of light on the literature of fifty years ago—which extinguished Rosa Matilda fiction and Delia Cruscan poetry—substituted true criticism for technical carping upon philological points, and established new styles in every branch of the belles-lettres—this great constellation may now be said to have disappeared. One of the brightest, if not of the largest stars, has long been obscured, and is now quite put out. The fame of Moore is fairly a matter of discussion. It cannot, we believe, be denied that much of his serious and more ambitious verse, founded on promptings of a more luscious and florid fancy than the present tastes incline to admit, and no inconsiderable portion even of his lyric pieces,—refined to attenuation—are less read and admired than they were a score or thirty years ago. A severer and sterner school of poetry has succeeded—one of deeper feeling and more sober thought; and the representatives of those who revelled in Lalla Rookh, and delighted in the strains of Mr. Little, now generally address themselves to more staid and philosophic musings. The Irish Melodies, too—exquisite as is their word-music—fanciful as is their conception—delightful as is their playfulness, and touching as is their pathos—even the Irish Melodies, we believe are declining in popular estimation. The reasons are obvious. In the first place, the Irish Melodies are not particularly Irish; they have grace, sparkling fancy, delicious feeling; but they are too fine-spun to do the work-a-day duty of popular songs. As literary performances, nine-tenths of Burns's are inferior to Moore's; and all Dibdin's are immeasurably beneath them. Yet the probability is that When Willie Brewed, and Poor Tom Bowling, will be in the full tide of popularity, where Rich and Rare, and Oh Breathe not His Name, will be unsung and forgotten. In a certain circle, and among people of a certain reading and appreciation, Moore will live as long as the language; but his genius was delicate and acute rather than catholic and strong. He had a rich play of fancy, but none of the soaring imagination of Shelley or Byron. His mind, in fact, was a first-class second-rate. It had no pretensions to stand in the line of the giants of his time. Brightly fanciful, rather than continuously imaginative—teeming with poetic imagery—loving to sparkle along the floweriest paths, and beneath the balmiest skies—revelling always in fays and flowers—in love, and mingled intellectual and sensual pleasures—playful in the extreme, and always ready to stop to make mirth as joyous and as delightful as the passion—his muse, in his great romantic poems, is the incarnation of a charming Epicureanism; and the mirth and jolity could go a long step further. He had wit, which sparkled as brightly as it could cut deeply; and humor, and sense of the ludicrous, which could be as well, if not more effectually applied to living persons and actual things than to the creations of his own fancy; and accordingly we find him loving to turn from the etherealized voluptuousness of Loves of the Angels, or the mystic imaginings of the Epicurean, to the sharp and brilliant hittings of political and social squibs—the restless satire with which, in the Fudge Family and hundreds of ephemeral but not the less clever lays, he quizzed his political and literary opponents, abolished the Earl of Mountcashell, or shot stinging shafts through the heart of the Benthamites. It is, indeed, far from probable that Moore's political and satiric poetry, little perhaps as he thought of it at the time, will live after his more ambitious works have sunk into that chronic state of classicism, in which books are labelled with an excellent character, and shelved—turned into the category of works without which no gentleman's library is complete, and doomed, not to actual obscurity, but to honorable retirement. The last of his political squibs and short poems were given to the world in the columns of the Morning Chronicle; and referred principally to the earlier struggles of the Anti-Corn Law League—the verses having in most cases been suggested by pasting political events.
Thomas Moore died at the ripe age of seventy-two. He was born on the 28th of May, 1780, in Angier-street, Dublin, where his father, a strict Roman Catholic, carried on a grocery and spirit business. As a child, he is said to have been remarkable for personal beauty; but his appearance in after life hardly carried out the promise of infancy. He was short, with a heavy, expressive, but not handsome face, which, however, lightened up wonderfully when conversing or singing his own ballads. He was educated at Dublin, and one of big first noted peculiarities was a fondness and a talent for private theatricals. Taking advantage of the boon, as it was then considered, the young Roman Catholic was entered at Trinity College. He could not, of course, obtain a degree; but some English verses tendered at an examination, in lieu of the usual Latin composition, procured a copy of the Travels of Anacharsis, as a reward. The wild times of the Irish rebellion were approaching, and the poet was naturally to be found in the ranks led by the Emmetts and Arthur O'Connor; but his treasonable lucubrations, though, as his own sister remarked, "rather strong," were passed over without any measures against the enthusiastic young champion of liberty. Politics, however, were by no means the only subject of his muse. At the age of fourteen he published poetry in a Dublin magazine, and afterwards composed many semi-burlesque pieces for private representation.
In his twentieth year, giving up republicanism for ever, Moore came to London to study at the Middle Temple, and publish his translations, or rather paraphrases, of Anacreon. As may be imagined, he attended much more to the Greek than to Coke upon Lyttleton, and permission, obtained through the friendship of Lord Moira, to dedicate the work to the Prince Regent, was the means of his introduction to those elevated circles in which he was afterwards to move and shine. His Anacreon was highly successful, and was succeeded, in 1801, by Poems and Songs, by Thomas Little. Whatever objections may be raised by the present generation to either of these works, there can be no doubt of their vivid play of fancy, their singular grace, even when verging on improprieties, and their exquisite melody of versification. His translations of the Old Greek Lover, and of Women and Wine, are probably the finest and richest versions of these often rendered songs in the English language—always excepting the rough but thoroughly racy version of the last, by quaint old Mr. Donne.
In the days of the regency, poets came in for patronage, and Mr. Moore, made registrar to the Court of Admiralty at Bermuda—as singularly appropriate an appointment as some we have seen in our own day—went out to the islands, appointed a deputy, took a glance at the United States, and came home again. He then published Sketches of Travel and Society beyond the Atlantic—a satiric work in heroic verse, vigorously written, but politically evincing a miserable short-sightedness. Soon afterwards, a savage review in the Edinburgh, of a republication of Juvenile Songs, &c., led to the celebrated rencontre between Moore and Jeffrey, at Hampstead, when the great critic, as Byron asserted, stood valiantly up:
"When Little's leadless pistol met his eye
And Bow-street myrmidons stood laughing by."
The affair was ultimately arranged, mainly through the intervention of Mr. Rogers, and at his house Moore shortly afterwards made his first acquaintance with Byron and Campbell. The long and affectionate intimacy between Moore and the author of Childe Harold, we need here only allude to. Moore had about this time married. His wife was a Miss Dyke, a woman, of strong sense and character, as well as great beauty and amiability. Their children are all dead.
A couple of political satires of no great merit—one setting forth a sober and earnest panegyric upon ignorance—were followed by the famous Two-penny Post Bag, a bundle of rollicking satire and humor. It made a great hit. Not so its author's next venture, a farce called the Blue Stocking, damned at the Lyceum. Moore's intimacy with Byron and Hunt was broken off by the outspoken tone of the Liberal, and especially by the Vision of Judgment. Moore thought his friends had gone too far. What would Carlton House say! For if, as Byron said, "Little Tommy dearly loved a lord," with how much more affection did he worship a prince of the blood royal?
The Melodies were his next, and perhaps most popular compositions. Charming as they are, and exquisitely finished as is their lyrical workmanship, we doubt whether they have the stamina and heart-rooted earnestness, which are requisite to make songs immortal. Only the strongest heart and the manliest brain produce offspring to suit all tastes and to last all time.