The notices of Byron’s life were followed by “Memoirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald,” whose career had attracted Moore’s ardent and most consecrated sympathies. The life of this ill-fated nobleman was written throughout with heart and feeling; and, perhaps, may be taken as the most favorable specimen of its author’s prose style. Besides, he had shown his prowess in political and religious controversy, in the “Life of Captain Rock,” as also in the “Travels of an Irish Gentleman;” and he contributed a history of Ireland to “Lardner’s Cyclopædia.” These emanations are characterized by much of the beauty of language, liveliness of remark, and tenderness of sentiment, displayed in his metrical writings, but without being received with similar tokens of approbation. The surpassing charms of his happy and exuberant verse, ever displaying a fancy rich, spirited, elegant, and impassioned, though not sublime, or always immortal, have been universally felt and confessed; the enchantment they produced for a time on the public mind and imagination, was beyond all dispute or question: but with his prose works it was widely different. Whatever their intrinsic merits, they have failed to rank in public interest or estimation with his poetic compositions. Nevertheless, the nature of some of them, the subjects to which they related, and the principles they sought to maintain, support, and vindicate, were such, that the Irish patriots of the period conceived their author fairly entitled to share in the glories they were acquiring, and the laurels they were reaping in the British Parliament. This conclusion being arrived at, Moore was graciously requested to leave his quiet and peaceful abode in Wiltshire, and appear as a candidate for the representation of Limerick, in order that he might “pursue the triumph and partake the gale.” He was not, however, so ambitious of senatorial rank as to accept of an honor, which the peculiar circumstances under which it could have been conferred, and the conditions on which it would have been held, rendered, to say the least, equivocal in character. Moore, by the favor of his political friends, enjoyed a pension from the crown during the latter years of his life; but they were darkened, and his beaming intellect clouded, by the domestic losses and calamities, which, at this period, he had to endure. The once gay, vivacious, and captivating poet, died at his residence, Slopperton Cottage, near Devizes, on the 26th of February, 1852, and he was laid at rest in the green church-yard at Bonham. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. Three months previous to the date when the ashes of Sir Godfrey Kneller mingled with kindred dust, the first Englishman who, according to the eloquent eulogium of Burke, added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country, was cradled, with time-honored formalities, in a borough town of Devonshire.