"Brisk let us revel, while revel we may; For the gay bloom of fifty soon passes away, And then people get fat And infirm and all that, And a wig (I confess it) so clumsily sits That it frightens the little loves out of their wits." Taking them as a whole, it would be hard to find better examples of light-hearted satire. Moore had little of the _soeva indignatio_; his touch was on the ridiculous rather than the disgusting; and even the Prince of Wales could take fun out of the chaff directed against his fat pretensions to comeliness. Probably no one was much the worse, or the better, for Moore's satire, and it abounds so in topical allusion, of the most ephemeral kind, that to-day the interest has evaporated. But the reader can easily understand its immediate popularity, and it is distressing to think that Carpenter should have reaped the lion's share of the profit. From this onward Moore very wisely sought another publisher. His residence at Ashbourne lasted till March 1817, and the years spent there were the most fertile of his existence. The period was terminated by a move to the neighbourhood of London to supervise the publication of _Lalla Rookh_, and virtually the whole of this poem may be said to have been composed in Mayfield Cottage. In the same period, Moore produced the sixth number of the _Irish Melodies_ and the first number of his _Sacred Songs_, which rank next in importance to the _Melodies_ among his poetical works. If he had never written a line after 1817, his reputation as a poet would stand no less high than it does at present. The volume of the _Melodies_ which Power issued in 1815 contains several poems which throw an interesting light on the poet's state of feeling towards politics, and especially towards his own country. One of the most successful songs in the number (as indeed it deserved to be) was the lyric in which the reproach of Catholic Ireland to the Prince who had gone back on his early protestations is put as the complaint of a forsaken woman:-- "When first I met thee, warm and young, There shone such truth about thee, And on thy lip such promise hung, I did not dare to doubt thee. I saw thee change, yet still relied, Still clung with hope the fonder, And thought, though false to all beside, From me thou couldst not wander. But go, deceiver! go,-- The heart, whose hopes could make it Trust one so false, so low, Deserves that thou shouldst break it." And the closing refrain has a real energy:-- "Go--go--'tis vain to curse, 'Tis weakness to upbraid thee; Hate cannot wish thee worse Than guilt and shame have made thee." Moore wrote to Power in the early part of 1815, after a visit to Chatsworth, where he had spent his days in a whirl of fine company:--