"No, not for the wealth of the land, that supplies thee With millions to heap upon Foppery's shrine;-- No, not for the riches of all who despise thee, Though this would make Europe's whole opulence mine;-- "Would I suffer what--ev'n in the heart that thou hast-- All mean as it is--must have consciously burn'd, When the pittance, which shame had wrung from thee at last, And which found all his wants at an end, was return'd." There is a real anger inspiring the phrase, worthy of Dryden at his best, which stigmatises the Prince's life--"a sick epicure's dream, incoherent and gross." But Moore was too easily moved by kindness, and a civil word or action from Eldon or from Canning exempted them for ever from his attacks. Except Castlereagh, in whom he saw with justice the inveterate enemy of Ireland--and that enemy a renegade from Grattan's principles--he pursued no man relentlessly, and no institution moved him to continued hatred except the Church of Ireland. "Could you not contrive," said Sydney Smith to a portrait painter at work on a head of Moore, "to throw into the features a little more hostility to the Establishment?" Enough hostility certainly was thrown into the verses which he continued for years to contribute to the papers; and he pleased himself vastly with one address to a shovel hat:-- "Gods! when I gaze upon that brim, So redolent of Church all over, What swarms of Tithes, in vision dim,-- Some pig-tail'd, some like cherubim, With ducklings' wings--around it hover! Tenths of all dead and living things, That Nature into being brings, From calves and corn to chitterlings." It is not a long way from verse of this kind on this subject to the prose of "Captain Rock." The distance, no doubt, covers a descent. But it may fairly be urged that if Moore after the year 1823 was only in a secondary sense a writer of verse, and primarily occupied with prose, the reason is, not that prose was easier or paid better, but because he was increasingly preoccupied with matter which he could not handle except in prose--matter of serious controversial argument--and matter which he was impelled to handle by a growing desire to serve his own country. [1] _Alciphron_, issued in 1839, was, as has been said, a rehandling of a fragment composed during his residence in Paris, and has in any case no importance. CHAPTER V WORK AS BIOGRAPHER AND CONTROVERSIALIST