The house at Sloperton is a small, neat, but comparatively poor cottage, for which Moore paid originally the princely sum of forty pounds a year, "furnished." Subsequently, however, he became its tenant under a repairing-lease at eighteen pounds annual rent. He took possession of it in November, 1817. Bessy was "not only satisfied, but delighted with it, which shows the humility of her taste," writes Moore to his mother; "for it is a small thatched cottage, and we get it furnished for forty pounds a year." "It has a small garden and lawn in front, and a kitchen-garden behind. Along two of the sides of this kitchen-garden is a raised bank,"--the poet's "terrace-walk," so he loved to call it. Here a small deal table stood through all weathers; for it was his custom to compose as he walked, and at this table to pause and write down his thoughts. Hence he had always a view of the setting sun; and I believe nothing on earth gave him more intense pleasure than practically to realize the line,-- "How glorious the sun looked in sinking!"-- for, as Mrs. Moore has since told us, he very rarely missed this sight. In 1811, the year of his marriage, he lived at York Terrace, Queen's Elm, Brompton. Mrs. Moore tells me it was a pretty house: the Terrace was then isolated, and opposite nursery-gardens. Long afterwards (in 1824) he went to Brompton to "indulge himself with a sight of that house." In 1812 he was settled at Kegworth; and in 1813, at Mayfield Cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. Of Mayfield, one of his friends, who twenty years afterwards accompanied him there to see it, remarks on the small, solitary, and now wretched-looking cottage, where all the fine "orientalism" and "sentimentalism" had been engendered. Of this cottage he himself writes,--"It was a poor place, little better than a barn; but we at once took it and set about making it habitable." As Burns was made a gauger because he was partial to whiskey, Moore was made Colonial Secretary at Bermuda, where his principal duty was to "overhaul the accounts of skippers and their mates." Being called to England, his affairs were placed in charge of a superintendent, who betrayed him, and left him answerable for a heavy debt, which rendered necessary a temporary residence in Paris. That debt, however, was paid, not by the aid of friends, some of whom would have gladly relieved him of it, but literally by "the sweat of his brow." Exactly so it was when the MS. "Life of Byron" was burned: it was by Moore, and not by the relatives of Byron, (neither was it by aid of friends,) the money he had received was returned to the publisher who had advanced it. "The glorious privilege of being independent" was, indeed, essentially his,--in his boyhood, throughout his manhood, and in advanced age,--always!