It found itself about as much at home, I should say, as is the ordinary European in oriental costume at a masked ball. To wear Eastern clothes like an Eastern is possible, for one who has assimilated the Eastern way of life; otherwise, incongruities reveal themselves with every gesture. Byron, happier than Moore in his choice, wrote of an East that touches the West, of the clash between Frank and Moslem. Worse still, Moore was an amatory poet, he had made successes by writing about love; and accordingly, he determined to rely in his poems--as Scott, wiser than he, had not done--on the love interest. He misunderstood his own temperament. Love poetry of the serious order demands passion, and Moore is the poet of dalliance, not of passion. The passion--if it can be called a passion--of pity, the passion of political enthusiasm, he had; but the violence of exclusive desire, whether lasting or temporary, which Byron so often rendered, was a chord outside of Moore's range. The poets of Moore's own day, who knew and liked Moore, never cared for _Lalla_; and Leigh Hunt, an excellent critic, spoke the truth about it. Condemning the poem gently as "too florid in its general style," though allowing to it exquisite passages, he goes on:-- "You are so truly, by birth, a poetical animal, out of the pale of book-associations and a free inhabitant of the most Elysian parts of nature, that the more you resolved to speak and to feel out of the sincerity of your own impulses, without thinking it necessary to search for ideas, the more to your advantage I am persuaded it would be. You are a born poet and have only to claim your inheritance--not to be heaping up a multitude of anxious proofs which, though mistaken by some for ostentation, are in reality evidences of a diffidence of pretension which you ought not to feel." No man could give better advice. Moore had written narrative poetry, one may safely say, because the fashion of the day was for narrative. He had caught at Rogers's suggestion of poetry on an Eastern theme, which was to give him a new field. As he worked on, he felt his theme alien, and tried to make himself at home in it by taking into the subject what really belonged to another atmosphere; and further, he decided that "he must try to make up for his deficiencies in _dash_ and vigour by versatility and polish." Not in this way is poetry written; the poet who tries to accommodate himself to the taste of the public is destroying his art.