A much higher rank may be claimed for him as a writer of satiric verse than of romantic narrative. The satiric inspiration with him long outlasted the other, for the _Loves of the Angels_ was virtually the last poem published under his own name.[1] But under his other incarnation, as Thomas Brown the Younger, he contributed squibs to various newspapers and issued volumes for another dozen of years. The _Odes on Cash, Catholics, and other matters_, collected in 1828, show him to advantage, and we find something of the "wonted fires" even in _The Fudges in England_, published so late as 1835, after his brain had begun to flag. But for the top of his achievement in this kind one would always turn to the volume published a few months after The _Loves of the Angels_. This was the _Fables for the Holy Alliance and Rhymes on the Road_, comprising the work which he had cast and recast so often in Paris, together with a considerable handful of occasional verses. From this general laudation, the _Rhymes on the Road_, Moore's impressions of Switzerland and Italy, must be excepted. Nothing in them repays perusal but the "Introductory Rhymes," with their ingenious and erudite discussion of the places and methods in which poets may compose--where Moore incidentally alludes to a favourite theory and practice of his own, which he supported by the example of Milton, as well as that here cited:-- "Herodotus wrote most in bed, And Richerand, a French physician, Declares the clockwork of the head Goes best in that reclined position." There is also a good skit on the ubiquitous English tourist, which ends with the vision of "Some Mrs. Hopkins, taking tea And toast upon the wall of China." But for the rest, we have serious lucubrations--a long, long way after _Childe Harold_--upon Venice, Florence, the first view of Mont Blanc, Rousseau's abode, and other such moving themes. It is a vast relief to turn to the _Fables_, of which there are eight; and if one reader thinks the first the best, with its description of all the royalties at dinner in an Ice Palace on the Neva, and the general confusion when the Ice Palace takes to melting, it is odds but the next will choose another for his favourite. Most of them have a Proem, and one may quote the Proem and part of the Fable of "The Little Grand Lama." PROEM.