Like them, Moore relied upon the charm of an exciting narrative, laid in unfamiliar scenes, and furnished with highly-coloured descriptive passages. But, whereas Scott wrote of the Border where he had been bred, and Byron of the East where he had travelled in days when the traveller was obliged to become a real part of every scene in which he moved, Moore laid his stories in a country known to him only through books, and he derived them from a literature remote and alien from all European sympathies. The natural consequence is that, whereas Scott's and Byron's descriptions savour of actual experience, Moore's reek of the lamp; and, with astonishing lack of judgment, he spoilt whatever illusion might exist, by the constant interposition of footnotes to explain the fragments of Eastern custom, tradition, or natural history, which he had laboriously wrought in. Nothing could more strongly stamp the artificial character of the whole. The truth, which Moore unhappily did not realise, is that poetry should be made, not out of things new but of things old; out of the familiar, not the unfamiliar. His research for novelty of subject was fatal to him; the attractions which he sought to give his work are those which poetry in the true sense must dispense with. Scott handled material wrought over a hundred times in Border ballads. Byron indeed made poetry from the novel, the strange, the obviously picturesque. But what keeps Byron's poetry alive is the element of personal emotion which Byron contributed to the subject. In so far as anything survives of _Lalla Rookh_, the same is true of Moore. The introductory pages prefixed to _Lalla Rookh_ in the 1841 edition of Moore's poems bear out this view. Moore relates his difficulties--his many attempts, begun and thrown aside. In one of these rejected stories, and only one, he writes, "had I yet ventured to involve that most homefelt of all my inspirations which has lent to the story of 'The Fire Worshippers' its main attraction and interest"--that half-veiled reference to Irish history and Irish aspirations, of which mention has already been made. Moore shrewdly observes that the absence of this sort of feeling in the other preliminary sketches-- "was the reason doubtless, though hardly known at the time to myself, that, finding my subjects so slow in touching my sympathies, I began to despair of their ever touching the hearts of others.... But at last--fortunately, as it proved--the thought occurred to me of founding a story on the fierce struggle so long maintained between the Ghebers, or ancient Fire Worshippers of Persia, and their haughty Moslem masters. From that moment a new and deep interest in my whole task took possession of me. The cause of tolerance was again my inspiring theme; and the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland soon found itself at home in the East."