"Met Moore at dinner, and spent a very pleasant three hours. He told his stories with a hit-or-miss air, as if accustomed to people of rapid apprehension. It being asked at Paris who they would have as godfather for Rothschild's child, 'Talleyrand,' said a Frenchman. _'Pourquoi, Monsieur?' 'Parce qu'il est le moins chrétien possible.'_ Moore is a delightful, gay, voluptuous, refined, natural creature; infinitely more unaffected than Wordsworth; not blunt and uncultivated like Chantrey, or bilious and shivering like Campbell. No affectation, but a true, refined, delicate, frank poet, with sufficient air of the world to prove his fashion, sufficient honesty of manner to show fashion has not corrupted his native taste; making allowance for prejudices instead of condemning them, by which he seemed to have none himself; never talking of his own work from an intense consciousness that everybody else did; while Wordsworth is talking of his own productions from apprehension that they are not enough matter of conversation. Men must not be judged too hardly. Success or failure will either destroy or better the finest natural parts. Unless one had heard Moore tell the above story of Talleyrand, it would have been impossible to conceive the air of half-suppressed impudence, the delicate light-horse canter of phrase, with which the words floated out of his sparkling anacreontic mouth." To the personal notability which his social talent secured him, Moore owed much of his later successes as a prose writer: in part because of the access which it afforded to sources of information; in part because everybody knew him, and read with expectation whatever he wrote. But as a poet, his fame was a thing wholly independent of personal charm. People knew that the writer whose songs they had by heart was courted in the most brilliant world; they knew also that he had shown in various difficult junctures a high spirit of honour and independence. But they knew these things mainly because they liked his poetry. Prom all this contemporary fame of the poet, one must try to analyse what remains.