A second draft for £100 followed quick on it, and early in the next year, still worse news. The young man had sold his commission and was on his way home. £1500 in all had been spent in fitting him out and purchasing, first an ensigncy, then a lieutenancy; and this was the upshot of so much anxiety and outlay. And the second boy, who had done all that could be hoped of him, was on his way home too, to a sad meeting. "It seemed all but death," Moore writes, "when he stepped out of the carriage exhausted with the journey, and wasted with lung disease." There was a rally for a few months, during which Moore was busy trying to shape some new future for the prodigal Tom, who was remaining in France. Four hundred pounds would have preserved his lieutenancy (being the money actually paid down out of the price of his commission), but Moore refused to find it. He was already reduced to borrowing from a friend, Mr. Boyse, his Wexford host; and though Rogers, Lord Lansdowne, and probably many others would, as Lord John Russell regretfully comments, have willingly advanced the larger sum, they heard nothing of the need. Moore's own object was to secure his son a commission in the Austrian service, but Tom himself wrote from France suggesting the Légion Étrangère. Interest was quickly made with Soult through Madame Adelaide, who received the prodigal and made much of him for his father's sake--"a continuation of that spoiling process," Moore writes sadly, "to which poor Tom (as my son) has been from his childhood subjected." The thing was settled accordingly, not without another draft for a hundred and odd pounds to enable the son to leave for Algiers. A few days before he set out for the new dangers and hardships of Africa, his brother had died peacefully at home. It was only the last straw in a load of trouble that the one remaining child could not even get leave for a farewell visit home, before he launched, under no good omens, into a new career and clime. The record of the nest year (1843) is short and uninteresting--notes of engagements for the most part. One is characteristic enough to quote:-- "_March_ 23. Breakfasted at Rogers's to meet Jeffrey and Lord John--two of the men I like best among my numerous friends. Jeffrey's volubility (which was always superabundant) becomes even more copious, I think, as he grows older. But I am ashamed of myself for finding any fault with him." _"Lenior et melior fit accedente senecta"_ is a phrase that has full application to this veteran of letters. The year closed with a cruel hoax (the crueller as it coincided with fresh demands from Tom). Some one in Ireland wrote to inform Moore that £300 had been left him as a testimony of regard. Moore had suspicions, but he adds:--