On his return from America in 1803, we lose sight of him for a while. He was then probably harassed by government transactions connected with his luckless appointment; but in 1805 he gave unhappy evidence of his revival by the publication of _Poems by Mr Thomas Little_. We have no desire to speak of this work. Perhaps “his poverty, but not his will,” was in fault. He made some kind of apology at the time, by attributing the performance “to an imagination which had become the slave of the passions;” and subsequently he made the better apology of excluding it from his collected volumes. Yet, in this work, he did less harm to society than injustice to himself. The graver classes, of course, repelled it at once; the fashionable world took but little notice of a book which could not be laid in their drawing-rooms; and the profligate could be but little excited by its babyisms, for Moore’s amatory poems were always babyish. They wanted, in a remarkable degree, the fervency of passion. They prattled rather than felt: they babbled of lips and eyes like an impudent child; their Cupid was always an Urchin, and the urchin was always in the nursery. His verses of this school were flowing, but they never rose above prettiness; they never exhibited love in its living reality—in its seriousness and power—its madness of the brain, and absorption of the soul—its overwhelming raptures, and its terrible despair. There is a deeper sense of the truth and nature of _passion_ in a single ballad of Burns than in all the amatory poems that Moore ever wrote. The injustice to himself consisted in his thus leaving it in the hands of every stranger, to connect the life of the man with the licentiousness of the author. Yet we have never heard that his life was other than decorous; his conversation certainly never offended general society—his manners were polished—and we believe that his mind was at all times innocent of evil intention. Still, these poems threw a long shade on the gentle lustre of his fame. He now fell under the lash of the _Edinburgh Review_, never more sternly, and seldom so justly, exercised. Moore indignantly sent a message to the editor. Jeffrey, refusing to give up the name of the Zoilus in disguise, accepted the message, and the parties met. Fortunately some friend, with more sense than either, sent also _his_ message, but it was to the Bow Street magistrates, and the belligerents were captured on the field. In conveying the instruments of war to Bow Street, the bullets had fallen out; and this circumstance was, of course, too comic to be forgotten by the wits. The press shot forth its epigrams, the point of which was the harmlessness of the hostilities. It was observed— “That the pistols were leadless Is no sort of news, For _blank_-cartridge should always Be fired at _Reviews_.” We transcribe but another squib.