In the next publication, which followed rapidly upon the success of the first, Moore dispensed with erudition. Censorious people shook their heads over the _Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little, Esq._, and it must be allowed that the censure had some justification. In the remarks upon _Anacreon_, Moore had praised that poet because "his descriptions are warm; but the warmth is in the ideas not the words." There is certainly no grossness in the words of Mr. Thomas Little, but there is considerable warmth in his ideas--and indeed what could be more natural? Moore was an exceedingly healthy normal young man, strongly attracted towards the other sex, but exempt from any vehemences of passion. The tone of these lyrics is rather that of the Restoration poets than of the earlier Caroline school; there is prettiness, elegance, gaiety, rather than beauty; and, as in all his models, there is preoccupation rather with a sex than an individual. It is amatory poetry, not love-poetry; but in its own kind, it is as good as can be found. What could be better than "Still the question I must parry, Still a wayward truant prove, Where I love I cannot marry, Where I marry cannot love." No other poet for a hundred years had got such elasticity and gaiety out of English rhythms as were to be found in these two early volumes. One need not claim high rank for this sort of poetry, but it would be ignorant to overlook the service which Moore was doing to all who after him came to handle English metre. So much for his successes. The second volume is also interesting with records of his failures. The "Fragments of College Exercises" show a futile attempt to wield the heroic couplet with sonorous rhetoric. And in two other poems, _Reuben and Rose and The Ring_, we find Moore wandering off after the fashion of the German spectral ballad:-- "'Twas Reuben, but ah! he was deathly and cold, And fleeted away like the spell of a dream." And so on, with cold carcases and other properties of this form of composition, to which the poet never returned--wisely recognising that it was not for him to make readers' flesh creep.