At Sloperton, Moore wrote, also, his History of Ireland and the Biographies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and Lord Byron—the last the best of the three, a biography ranking with Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and Lockhart’s Life of Scott. After his “Captain Rock,” Moore published the “Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion,” in which he girds at all Protestant doctrine, with his usual power of theologic reading and pointed argument; and then gave to the world his “Epicurean;” in which he intertwines his favorite ethics of religion with the frame of a very dull story. Moore’s mind had a strong devotional tendency, and seems to revert—with a sense of its own insufficiency—to the problem of existence beyond the last scene of all that ends the strange eventful history of life. His doubtings, if he ever had any, seem to have taken ultimate refuge in Catholic orthodoxy. He was, in fact, a dutiful son of mother Church: and great was the uneasiness he exhibited, lest his friend, Lord Byron, should adopt, in all their force, the atheistical ideas of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom his lordship had become very intimate, in Italy. Moore earnestly expostulated with Byron on the project of the “Liberal” newspaper, got up by the restless Childe and supported by Hunt, Shelley, and Hazlitt. He told his lordship that such a conjunction, with such a radical purpose, was very far from respectable—not by any means respectable enough for an English nobleman to engage in. The last productions of Moore were those light and satirical verses which appeared in the Morning Chronicle and other papers, up to 1837. They are the happiest things of their kind, in the world, and to those who can admire the gay dexterities of wit, woven into the tapestry work of rhyme, they possess an interest surviving the subjects of them. In the interweaving of pointed and witty things with the flow of colloquial phraseology, Moore has shown himself more skillful than any of his contemporaries, and no writer of the present day can match him.