We can imagine the look of melancholy with which, after having finished his stanzas, Moore gave a moonlight glance to the woods and wilds, as he stood at his cottage door, and thought of the lively scenes at that moment glittering in London. Solitude may be the place of the philosopher, and universities the stronghold of science; but, for the knowledge of life, the play of character, the vigour of manly competitorship, and even the variety of views, events, and character, which make the true materials of the poetic faculty, association with our kind is indispensable. The poet in retirement either becomes the worship of a circle of women, who pamper him with panegyric, until he degenerates into silliness; or, living alone, becomes the worse thing—a worshipper of himself. Like a garrison cut off from its supplies, he lives on short allowance of ideas; like a hermit, thinks his rags sanctity, and his nonsense Oracles; or, like Robinson Crusoe, imagines his geese conversible, and his island an empire. It is true, that Moore suffered less from this famine of poetic food than most of his race. His buoyancy of spirit never lost sight wholly of London, and his annual visit to the concerts and conversations of Berkeley Square, and other scenes of high life, refreshed his recollections. But when he tells us that _Lalla Rookh_ was written “amid the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters,” and, in a phraseology which seems like apologising to himself for this exile, talks of his “being enabled by that _concentration_ of thought, which _retirement alone_ can give, to call up around him some of the sunniest of his Eastern scenes,” the very toil and turgidity of the language show us that he felt himself in the _wrong_ place. In fact, now that naked necks, turned-down shirt-collars, and dishevelled hair, no longer make poets _à la_ Byron—when even the white waistcoats of Young England are no longer proof of chivalry—we wish to save the innocent hearts and fantastic heads of the rising generation from the experiment which Don Quixote performed so little to the satisfaction of Sancho Panza in the desert. We never heard of a great poet living a hundred miles from a metropolis. Contiguity to the world of men and women was essential. All the leaders of the tribe lived as near London as they could. Cowley lived within a walk, Pope within a drive, Milton within sight, of the walls—Shakspeare saw London Bridge every day of his life—Dryden lived in the Grecian Coffeehouse—Byron, with his own goodwill, never would have stirred out of Bond Street; and when the newspapers and Doctors’ Commons at length drove him abroad, he nestled down in Venice, instead of singing among the slopes of the Apennines, or acting distraction among the pinnacles of the Alps. It is even not improbable that the last few and melancholy years of Moore’s life owed some of their depression to the weariness of this unnatural solitude.