In 1799 he came to London to enter at the Middle Temple. (His first lodging was at 44, George Street, Portman Square.) Very soon afterwards we find him declining a loan of money proffered him by Lady Donegal. He thanked God for the many sweet things of this kind God threw in his way, yet at that moment he was "terribly puzzled how to pay his tailor." In 1811, his friend Douglas, who had just received a large legacy, handed him a blank check, that he might fill it up for any sum he needed. "I did not accept the offer," writes Moore to his mother; "but you may guess my feelings." Yet just then he had been compelled to draw on his publisher, Power, for a sum of thirty pounds, "to be repaid partly in songs," and was sending his mother a second-day paper, which he was enabled "to purchase at rather a cheap rate." Even in 1842 he was "haunted worryingly," not knowing how to meet his son Russell's draft for one hundred pounds; and a year afterwards he utterly drained his banker to send fifty pounds to his son Tom. Once, being anxious that Bessy should have some money for the poor at Bromham, he sent a friend five pounds, requesting him to forward it to Bessy as from himself; and when urged by some thoughtless person to make a larger allowance to his son Tom, in order that he might "live like a gentleman," he writes,--"If _I_ had thought but of living like a gentleman, what would have become of my dear father and mother, of my sweet sister Nell, of my admirable Bessy's mother?" He declined to represent Limerick in Parliament, on the ground that his "circumstances were not such as to justify coming into Parliament at all, because to the labor of the day I am indebted for my daily support." His must be a miserable soul who could sneer at the poet studying how he could manage to recompense the doctor who would "take no fees," and at his amusement when Bessy was "calculating whether they could afford the expense of a fly to Devizes."