Another great exultation helped to dispel the gloom of his Bermuda prospects, for in October Bessy became at last the mother of a son. Little comfort as this child proved to be in the long run, he was for years the apple of Moore's eye. The god-parents were, as usual, a strange and interesting assortment--Miss Godfrey, the shrewd and tried friend of so many years, Lord Lansdowne, and old Dr. Parr, the famous Grecian. This last was a recent acquaintance, sprung out of the work on which, during the year, Moore had been engaged--a new literary departure marking the incipient change in him from poet to man of letters. His lines on the death of Sheridan showed plainly the hold which the one brilliant Irishman had on the other's imagination, and Murray suggested in 1817 that Moore should be Sheridan's biographer. By August 1818, Moore was at work, visiting Sheridan's sister, Mrs. Le Fanu, in Bath; and at her house he first met Dr. Parr, who warmed to the scholar in Moore. They talked together of Erasmus, the Wolfian theory of Homer, and such like things; hobnobbing generously the while. Material in plenty for the Memoir was forthcoming, from a diversity of sources, but difficulties arose as to the share in the prospective profits claimed by the Sheridan family, and Moore occupied himself with other researches: reading _Boxiana_, visiting Jackson the pugilist, and studying other repositories of "flash" dialect, in order to fit himself for the task of writing his new squib _Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress_, in which a professional boxer, Crib, was the spokesman. It appeared in the spring of 1819; the seventh number of _Irish Melodies_ had been issued in the preceding year, so that it will appear that Moore's industry was constant. Work on the _Sheridan_ continued briskly, as we find by entries in his diary, it having been settled that Murray was to be the publisher and to pay 1000 guineas for the book. In the meantime Moore was turning over subjects for another poetical _opus magnum_, and something in his omnivorous reading suggested a story drawn from ancient Egypt--a first hint of the material which he ultimately wrought into his prose romance, _The Epicurean_.