It was time for Thomas Moore to depart; he had seen star after star decay:—many a glorious head stoop to the dust, many a soaring spirit extinguished—the passionate and wayward Byron, dying in a barrack, alone, at Missolonghi—an old, worn-out man at thirty-seven; and the delicate and sensuous Keats, in the morning of his days, exhaled into the clear blue sky of Rome; and “the pard-like spirit” of Shelley, passing, ere the noon, through the portals of his familiar haunt, the sea, to mingle with the elements which he so fearfully, so fearlessly worshiped in the world; and the Cervantic and fine-hearted Sir Walter—noblest of Scottish Chiefs; and the consummate lyric poet of Hope and Poland and, “by Susquehanna’s side, fair Wyoming;” and the three kings of bardish Cumberland—the weird and metaphysical Coleridge, as magnificent as Skiddaw—and as _misty_, for the most part—Thalaba, Southey, the library hermit—and Wordsworth, the consecrated hermit of the Mere and the Mountain; and, along with these “dead kings of melody,” the Shepherd of Ettrick, Allan Cunningham, Motherwell, the stormy, metallurgic soul of Ebenezer Elliott, and the swan-like music of Hemans. He saw them all pass away into the world of shadows—a more goodly and powerful troop of poets than any other age of British literature could boast—and he himself was not unworthy of that splendid and memorable brotherhood. Moore was born in May, 1779, at Aungier street in the city of Dublin, of Catholic parents. His father was a highly respectable grocer and spirit-dealer. Young Moore was sent to the school of Mr. Samuel Whyte, a man who enjoyed a high reputation as pedagogue in the metropolis. He had a very refined and dignified notion of his own vocation and literature, and was, withal, a good and kind-hearted man. He greatly encouraged the habits of public reading and elocution in his school; and the fashion of private theatricals being then very prevalent in the aristocratic families of Ireland, he was often called to superintend them at various houses. He encouraged his scholars to act scenes from plays, and was a great hand at furnishing prologues and epilogues for stage “_pieces de circonstance_.” Mr. Whyte was no common man; for it is, in all human probability, to his peculiar mode of training that English literature is indebted for two of its most brilliant ornaments. His encouragement of theatricals and songs, among the boys, gave Richard Brinsley Sheridan a tendency to the drama, and Moore a turn for lyrical composition and high-life; for we firmly and potently believe in the truth of the old hexameter embalmed in the Lindley Murray of our childhood— ’Tis Education forms the tender mind; Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.