Thomas Moore was one of the first Roman Catholics to take advantage of the Act of 1793, which threw open to them the University of Dublin. Although his co-religionists now obtained the privilege of attending the College classes, they were debarred until many years later from the higher academic honours, and Moore, who was entitled to a Scholarship on his answering, could not profit by it. He was, however, recognised by the authorities as a youth of promise, and was the recipient on one occasion of a special prize for a set of English verses, the prize being a copy of the _Travels of Anacharsis_, with the inscription, “_Propter laudabilem in versibus componendis progressum_.” Moore’s recollections of the debates in the Historical Society, of which he was a prominent member, are full of interest. He became a close friend of Emmet, who was, he tells us, at this time “of the popular side in the Society the chief champion and ornament.” In 1798, when Lord Clare, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, held a solemn Visitation, with the view of discovering whether any treasonable persons or factions had been at work among the students, Moore was examined as a witness. At first he refused to take the oath, but, on learning that such refusal would lead to expulsion, submitted, and gave his evidence, which disclaimed all knowledge of any secret societies within the University. Moore acknowledges that the Visitation, though somewhat of an arbitrary proceeding, was justified in its results. There were, he tells us, a few, among them Robert Emmet, “whose total absence from the whole scene, as well as the dead silence that day after day followed the calling out of their names, proclaimed how deep had been their share in the unlawful proceedings inquired into by this tribunal.” The modern critics of the psychological school seem to have agreed to place “Anacreon” Moore far down on the roll of the “followers of the narrow footsteps of the bards.” They are unable to find, in _Lalla Rookh_ or the _Irish Melodies_, the intellectual mastery of life without which poetry has for them no real value. They complain that in Moore the sense of “The heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world”