Still, though the national pride was deeply hurt by the measure, the graver judgment of the nation acquiesced in the extinction of the Legislature. This was the fruit of those concessions which had been made by the ignorance of Government, and demanded by the intrigues of the Opposition. From the period of lowering the franchise to the Roman Catholic forty-shilling freeholder, the votes of the Romish peasantry became to the Government a terror, to the Opposition a snare, and to both, the sources of a new policy. In a few sessions more, the Parliament must have become almost totally _Papist_. Thus, after much declamation in the clubs, and much murmuring in the streets—after threats of declaring the mover of the measure “an enemy to his country”—and after a duel between the celebrated Grattan, the head of the Opposition, and Corry, the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, the diadem was taken off the head of Ireland, and quietly lodged in Whitehall. England thenceforth became the field of Irish ambition, and the mart of Irish ability. Moore came to London apparently for the purpose of commencing his studies as a barrister. Whether his volatile and fanciful spirit would have relished the details of a profession demanding so much labour in its rudiments, and so much perseverance in its pursuit, is now not worth a question, for he probably never opened a book of law; but he had brought with him a book of a more congenial kind; a translation of _Anacreon_, to be published by subscription, and dedicated “by permission” to the Prince of Wales, (George IV.,)—an honour obtained, like all his early popularity, through his musical accomplishments. Moore was not a scholar, in the sense of a Markland or a Bentley; but he had the best part of scholarship, the spirit of his author. The elegance of this versification of the old Greek lover of “smiles and wine” was universally acknowledged. All former translations of _Anacreon_ were poor and pedantic, to the richness and grace of the volume then offered to the public eye. Whether the original was the work of Ionia or Athens; whether one-half of the Odes were not _imitations_ in later Greek, with Gregory Nazianzen and a dozen others for their authors; whether Polycrates or Hipparchus was their patron—in short, the questions which still perplex Oxford, and break the rest of Cambridge—which drive both into the logomachies of Teutonic criticism, and waste English pens and patience on the imported drudgeries of the Leipsic press—were matters which gave the translator but slight trouble. Nature had created him for the translation—the praises of wine and beauty, of flowers and sunshine, were a language of his own; they formed his style through the greater part of his life; and Cupid and Bacchus never had a laureate more devoted, and more successful.