Nor did he fail to take advantage of the popular appetite for long poems which Scott and Byron had created; his _Lalla Rookh_, published in 1817, being very popular and very profitable. It was succeeded by another and his best satirical work, _The Fudge Family_, a charming thing. Up to this time he had been an exceedingly fortunate man; and his good luck, aided it must be said by his good conduct,--for Moore, with all his apparent weaknesses, was thoroughly sound at the core,--enabled him to surmount a very serious reverse of fortune. His Bermuda deputy was guilty of malversation so considerable that Moore could not meet the debt, and he had to go abroad. But Lord Lansdowne discharged his obligations; and Moore paid Lord Lansdowne. He returned to England in 1823, and was a busy writer for all but the last years of the thirty that remained to him; but the best of his work was done, with one exception. Byron left him his _Memoirs_, which would of course have been enormously profitable. But Lady Byron and others of the poet's connections were so horrified at the idea of the book appearing that, by an arrangement which has been variously judged, but which can hardly be regarded as other than disinterested on Moore's part, the MS. was destroyed, and instead of it Moore brought out in 1830 his well-known _Life of Byron_. This, some not incompetent judges have regarded as ranking next to Lockhart's _Scott_ and Boswell's _Johnson_, and though its main attraction may be derived from Byron's very remarkable letters, still shows on the part of the biographer very unusual dexterity, good feeling, and taste. The lives of _Sheridan_ and _Lord Edward Fitzgerald_ had, and deserved to have, less success; while a _History of Ireland_ was, and was bound to be, an almost complete failure. For, though a very good prose writer, Moore had little of the erudition required, no grasp or faculty of political argument, and was at this time of his life, if not earlier, something of a trimmer, certain to satisfy neither the "ascendency" nor the "nationalist" parties. His prose romance of _The Epicurean_ is much better, and a really remarkable, piece of work; and though the _Loves of the Angels_, his last long poem, is not very good, he did not lose his command either of sentimental or of facetious lyric till quite his last days. These were clouded; for, like his contemporaries Scott and Southey, he suffered from brain disease for some time before his death, on 25th February 1852.