And in everything that Moore wrote, there is a remembrance of Ireland. His great Oriental poem, _Lalla Rookh_, which appeared in 1817, was prepared for by the most conscientious study. There is not an image, not a description, or name, or historical incident or reference, which has any connection with Europe. Everything, without exception, bears witness to the familiarity of the author with the life and nature of the East. Nevertheless we know that the subject did not begin to interest him until he saw a possibility of making the struggle between the Fire-worshippers and the Mohammedans a pretext for preaching tolerance in the spirit of the song, "Come, send round the wine," which he had addressed to his countrymen in the _Irish Melodies_. And the interest of the reader, too, is not really awakened until he begins to divine Ireland and the Irish under these Ghebers and their strange surroundings. Hence it is that _The Fire-Worshippers_ is the only entirely successful part of the poem. The very names Iran and Erin melt into each other in the reader's ear. Moore himself says that the spirit which spoke in the _Irish Melodies_ did not begin to feel at home in the East till he set it to work on the _Fire-Worshippers_; and the beautiful poem, whose hero is a noble and unfortunate rebel, and whose heroine lives amongst people who speak of her lover with detestation, might well have been inspired by the memory of Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran. Some of the incidents recall their story. Before Hafed calls the Ghebers to revolt he has been wandering, an exile, in foreign lands; Hinda, devoured by anxiety for him, hears every day of massacres of the rebels. And when, learning that her lover has been burned, she drowns herself, the poet bewails her fate in a song, entire verses of which might, if _Erin_ were substituted for _Iran_, be added to "She is far from the land" without introducing a perceptibly foreign element. Take, for instance, the verse: "Nor shall Iran, beloved of her Hero, forget thee-- Though tyrants watch over her tears as they start, Close, close by the side of that Hero she'll set thee, Embalmed in the innermost shrine of her heart." And so exact is the resemblance between the spirit of the _Irish Melodies_ and that which reigns in this Asiatic epic, that it was possible to employ a sentence from the latter, without the change of a single word, as motto for the collection of documents relating to the Irish Rebellion which was published in the Fifties under the title: _Rebellion Book and Black History_. The lines are as follows;-- "Rebellion! foul, dishonouring word, Whose wrongful blight so oft has stained The holiest cause that tongue or sword Of mortal ever lost or gained. How many a spirit born to bless Hath sunk beneath that withering name, Whom but a day's, an hour's success Had wafted to eternal fame!"