In 1825 Moore paid a visit to Scott, who pronounced the Irish melodist the "prettiest warbler" he had ever heard. One evening Scott and his guest visited the theatre at Edinburgh. Soon after their unmarked entrance, the attention of the audience, which had been engrossed by the Duchess of St. Albans, was directed towards the new comers; and, according to a newspaper report, copied and published by Mr. Moore in one of his last prefaces, considerable excitement ensued. "Eh!" exclaimed a man in the pit, "eh, yon's Sir Walter, wi' Lockhart and his wife; and wha's the wee body wi' the pawkie een? Wow, but it's Tarn Moore, just." "Scott, Scott! Moore, Moore!" immediately resounded through the house. Scott would not rise; Moore did, and bowed several times, with his hand on his heart. Scott afterwards acknowledged the plaudits of his countrymen; and the orchestra, during the rest of the evening, played alternately Scotch and Irish airs. Soon after this period, Moore was established, by the kind offices of his old and stanch friend the Marquis of Lansdowne, in Sloperton Cottage, where he passed the remainder of his days, and where he ended them. It was here that he commenced his career as a biographer, and produced successively the memoirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Lord Byron, and Sheridan. The two latter are well known and highly appreciated. It was in the previous year that the poet first came out as a prose writer in the _Memoirs of Captain Rock_, a bitter and unfair account of--or rather commentary on--the English government of Ireland, and a curious instance of warped and twisted views in a man of the world like Moore, almost unavoidable in an Irishman writing of his country. His next serious work--he continued his squibs and sparkles of occasional verse--was the _Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion_--in which he attempted to show that the doctrines and practises of the Roman Catholic Church date from the apostolic period. The last of his prose works, and that which has attained a greater sale, we believe, than any of them, was the romance of _The Epicurean_. Here Moore's style, always too florid, is occasionally redeemed by passages of eloquence and natural feeling. There is much out-of-the-way learning in the book, but a pompous and cumbrous ornament overlays every thing. The book had great success, but of what Mr. Carlyle calls the "wind-bag" nature. The wind inside was very highly perfumed, and sighed with very pleasing murmurs, but it was only wind, and, as such, will ooze out presently, and the Epicurean bag will be little regarded.