The scholarly taste for historical research was unhappy in one of its consequences. As early as 1829, the Longmans projected a group of histories of the British Isles, in which England was to be treated by Sir James Mackintosh in three volumes, while Scott and Moore sketched, in a volume apiece, the story of their respective countries. Lord John Russell observes judiciously that had Moore kept to the restriction, the result might have been an easy, agreeable, and readable work. Unluckily, however, he obeyed rather his sense of what was needed in a history of Ireland than a perception of what he himself was fit to do, and the task, undertaken with alacrity, became a burden. Instead of one volume, it dragged out to four, of which the first appeared in 1835, and the last in 1846; and the work is wholly devoid of any original merit, bald and colourless. "His time," says Lord John, "was absorbed by it, his health worn, and his faculties dragged down to a wearisome and uncongenial task." Yet this is to blame unreasonably Moore's choice of a subject. The truth is that, when he engaged on it, his mind had lost its elasticity and freshness of invention, from a variety of circumstances which must be considered in a review of the last period of his life. At the same time, it was an honourable end to that long literary career. The easy singer of light loves closed his ceaseless activities with a long period of drudgery, spent, says Lord John Russell, in "the critical examination of obscure authorities upon an obscure subject." But the obscure subject was the history of the singer's own country, and Moore was at least well justified in holding that urgent need existed for spreading among the English, and still more among the Irish, a knowledge of the history of Ireland. [1] Probably Lord Moira. _See_ above, p. 55. CHAPTER VI THE DECLINE OF LIFE I have now sketched to its close the later period of Moore's literary career; there remains to be set out the sad list of domestic troubles under which his health and intellect finally gave way. But first, it is pleasant to dwell upon some of the brighter circumstances which made middle age for him not the least enjoyable period of a life rich in enjoyment--and above all upon the indications, which he so highly valued, of Ireland's growing enthusiasm for her own poet. Moore liked always "digito monstrari et dicier, 'Hic est'"; and his Journal abounds with records of his ingenuous satisfaction in such tributes. Here is an agreeable passage, which brings not only the little poet, but his very adoring (and adorable) wife, before us:--