THOMAS MOORE By STEPHEN GWYNN ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1905 CONTENTS CHAPTER I--Boyhood and Early Poems CHAPTER II--Early Manhood and Marriage CHAPTER III--"Lalla Rookh" CHAPTER IV--Period of Residence Abroad CHAPTER V--Work as Biographer and Controversialist CHAPTER VI--The Decline of Life CHAPTER VII--General Appreciation APPENDIX INDEX THOMAS MOORE CHAPTER I BOYHOOD AND EARLY POEMS Sudden fame, acquired with little difficulty, suffers generally a period of obscuration after the compelling power which attaches to a man's living personality has been removed; and from this darkness it does not always emerge. Of such splendour and subsequent eclipse, Moore's fate might be cited as the capital example. The son of a petty Dublin tradesman, he found himself, almost from his first entry on the world, courted by a brilliant society; each year added to his friendships among the men who stood highest in literature and statesmanship; and his reputation on the Continent was surpassed only by that of Scott and Byron. He did not live to see a reaction. Lord John Russell could write boldly in 1853, a year after his friend's death, that "of English lyrical poets, Moore is surely the greatest." There is perhaps no need to criticise either this attitude of excessive admiration, or that which in many cases has replaced it, of tolerant contempt. But it is as well to emphasise at the outset the fact that even to-day, more than a century after he began to publish, Moore is still one of the poets most popular and widely known throughout the English-speaking world. His effect on his own race at least has been durable; and if it be a fair test of a poet's vitality to ask how much of his work could be recovered from oral tradition, there are not many who would stand it better than the singer of the Irish Melodies. At least the older generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen now living have his poetry by heart.