The spirit of poetry in Mr. Moore is not a lying spirit. ‘Set it down, my tables’—we have still, in the year 1818, three years after the date of Mr. Southey’s laureateship, one poet, who is an honest man. We are glad of it: nor does it spoil our theory, for the exception proves the rule. Mr. Moore unites in himself two names that were sacred, till they were prostituted by our modern mountebanks, the Poet and the Patriot. He is neither a coxcomb nor a catspaw,—a whiffling turncoat, nor a thorough-paced tool, a mouthing sycophant, ‘a full solempne man,’ like Mr. Wordsworth,—a whining monk, like Mr. Southey,—a maudlin Methodistical lay-preacher, like Mr. Coleridge,—a merry Andrew, like the fellow that plays on the salt-box at Bartlemy Fair,—or the more pitiful jack-pudding, that makes a jest of humanity in St. Stephen’s Chapel. Thank God, he is like none of these—he is not one of the Fudge Family. He is neither a bubble nor a cheat. He makes it his business neither to hoodwink his own understanding, nor to blind or gag others. He is a man of wit and fancy, but he does not sharpen his wit on the edge of human agony, like the House of Commons’ jester, nor strew the flowers of fancy, like the Jesuit Burke, over the carcase of corruption, for he is a man not only of wit and fancy, but of common sense and common humanity. He sees for himself, and he feels for others. He employs the arts of fiction, not to adorn the deformed, or disguise the false, but to make truth shine out the clearer, and beauty look more beautiful. He does not make verse, ‘immortal verse,’ the vehicle of lies, the bawd of Legitimacy, the pander of antiquated prejudices, and of vamped-up sophistry; but of truths, of home, heartfelt truths, as old as human nature and its wrongs. Mr. Moore calls things by their right names: he shews us kings as kings, priests as priests, knaves as knaves, and fools as fools. He makes us laugh at the ridiculous, and hate the odious. He also speaks with authority, and not as certain scribes that we could mention. He has been at Court, and has seen what passes there.
‘Tam knew what’s what full brawly.’
But he was a man before he became a courtier, and has continued to be one afterwards; nor has he forgotten what passes in the human heart. From what he says of the Prince, it is evident that he speaks from habits of personal intimacy: he speaks of Lord Castlereagh as his countryman. In the Epistles of the Fudge Family, we see, as in a glass without a wrinkle, the mind and person of Royalty in full dress, up to the very throat, and we have a whole-length figure of his Lordship, in the sweeping, serpentine line of beauty, down to his very feet.[[50]]—We have heard it said of our poet, by a late celebrated wit and orator, that ‘there was no man who put so much of his heart into his fancy as Tom Moore; that his soul seemed as if it were a particle of fire separated from the sun, and were always fluttering to get back to that source of light and heat.’ We think this criticism as happy as it is just: but it will be evident to the readers of the Fudge Family, that the soul of ‘a certain little gentleman’ is not attracted with the same lively or kindly symptoms to the Bourbons, or to their benefactors and restorers ‘under Providence!’ The title of this delightful little collection of sweets and bitters, of honey and gall, is, we suppose, an allusion to the short ejaculation which honest Burchell, in the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ uttered at the end of every sentence, in the conversation of Miss Amelia Carolina Wilhelmina Skeggs and her friend, on the Court and Fashionables; and which word, ‘Fudge,’ our malicious Editor thinks equally applicable to the cant upon the same subjects at the present day,—to the fade politesse of the ancient regime,—to ‘the damnable face-making’ of Holy Alliances, and ‘the flocci-nauci-pili-nihili-fication’ of Legitimacy. He may be wrong in this; but if so, we are most assuredly in the wrong with him: and we confess, it gives us as much pleasure to agree with this writer, as it does to differ with some others that we could mention, but that they are not worth mentioning.—The Correspondents of the Fudge Family in Paris are much of the same stamp (with one exception) as the Correspondents of Dr. S——, in his work of that name, which was lately put a stop to by that sort of censorship of the press which is exercised by the reading public; only the Correspondents in the present volume have a very different Editor from him of ‘The Day and New Times,’ or, as it is at present called, The New Times alone, the Day having been left out as an anomaly, ‘ut lucus a non lucendo‘: for the readers of that paper roll their eyes in vain, and ‘find no dawn; but, in its stead, total eclipse and ever-during dark surrounds them.’—But to return from ‘the professional gentleman,’ as he calls himself, his scavenger’s bell, his mud-cart of liberal phraseologies, and go-cart of slavery and superstition, to something as different as genius from dulness, as wit from malice, as sense from moon-struck madness, as independence from servility, as the belles-lettres from law-stationery, as Parnassus from Grub-street, or as the grub from the butterfly,—as the man who winged his airy way from a Court which was unworthy of him, and which would have made him unworthy of himself, ‘as light as bird from brake,’ is from the man (if so he can be called) who would grope his way there on all fours, bringing, as the sacrifice best worthy of himself and of the place, his own dignity of spirit and the rights of his fellow-creatures, to be trampled down by the obscene hoofs of a base oligarchy. But we have already in another place spoken our minds of that person, in a way to cut off the communication between his ‘blind mouth’ and the Midas ears of the Stock Exchange; and we do not wish to deprive him of a livelihood. He may receive his Treasury wages for us, so that he no longer levies them on public credulity, and we no longer confound ‘his sweet voice’ with that of the country or city, though it may echo the Court. The New Times is a nuisance; but it is not one that requires to be abated. It speaks a plain, intelligible language. Its principles are as palpable as they are base. Its pettifogging pedantry and its Billingsgate slang can deceive nobody that is worth undeceiving. It is the avowed organ of the deliberate, detestable system which has long been covertly pursued in a certain quarter. This paper raves aloud, under the ambiguous garb of phrenzy, what its patrons think in secret. It proclaims on the house-tops what is whispered in the high places. It soothes the ears of flatterers, of tyrants, and of slaves,—but it sounds the alarm to free men. It is so far a great public good. It tells the people of England what is prepared for them, and what they have to expect. ‘Nothing is sacred in its pages but tyranny.’ It links this country in chains of vassalage to the legitimate despotisms of the Continent, which have been a bye-word with us for ages. It binds this nation, hand and foot, in the trammels of lasting servitude,—it puts the yoke upon our necks as we put pack-saddles upon asses,—marks the brand upon our foreheads as we ruddle over sheep,—binds us in ‘with shame, with rotten parchments, and vile inky blots,’—makes England, that threw off the yoke of a race of hereditary pretenders, shew ‘like a rebel’s whore,’ and every morning illegitimates the House of Brunswick, and strikes at the title of the Prince Regent to the succession of the Crown, to which his ancestors had no just claim but the choice of the people. It is not a paper for a free people to endure, if a people that has oppressed the struggling liberties of another nation can dare to call itself free; or for the Sovereign of a free people to look at, if a Prince who had restored a despot to a throne, in contempt of the voice of the people, could be supposed to respect the rights of human nature more than his own power. It reverses the Revolution of 1688, by justifying the claims of the Bourbons,—brings back Popery and slavery here, by parity of reasoning,—and sends the illustrious members of the present Royal Family a packing, as vagabonds and outlaws—by RIGHT DIVINE. If this is not a legitimate conclusion from the Doctor’s reasoning,—from his ‘brangle and brave-all, discord and debate,’—why then
‘The pillar’d firmament is rottenness,
And earth’s base built on stubble.’
The chief Dramatis Personæ: in the Fudge Family are,—Comic Personages, Miss Biddy Fudge and Mr. Bob Fudge, her brother: Mr. Philip Fudge, their father, and a friend of Lord Castlereagh, a grave gentleman; and a Mr. Phelim Connor, who is a patriotic, or, which is the same thing, a tragic writer. Miss Biddy Fudge takes the account of poke-bonnets and love-adventures upon herself; Mr. Bob, the patés, jockey-boots, and high collars: Mr. Phil. Fudge addresses himself to the Lord Viscount Castlereagh; and Mr. Phelim, ‘the sad historian of pensive Europe,’ appeals, we confess, more effectually to us, in words
‘As precious as the ruddy drops
That visit our sad hearts.’
Take for example the following magnanimous and most heroical Epistle:—
FROM PHELIM CONNOR TO ——