is fantastic and enervated—­a field of battle has nothing to do with dreams:—­and again, the two lines immediately after,

  “And every sword, true as o’er billows dim
  The needle tracks the load-star, following him”—­

are a mere piece of enigmatical ingenuity and scientific mimminee-pimminee.

We cannot except the Irish Melodies from the same censure.  If these national airs do indeed express the soul of impassioned feeling in his countrymen, the case of Ireland is hopeless.  If these prettinesses pass for patriotism, if a country can heave from its heart’s core only these vapid, varnished sentiments, lip-deep, and let its tears of blood evaporate in an empty conceit, let it be governed as it has been.  There are here no tones to waken Liberty, to console Humanity.  Mr. Moore converts the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box[A]!—­We do except from this censure the author’s political squibs, and the “Two-penny Post-bag.”  These are essences, are “nests of spicery”, bitter and sweet, honey and gall together.  No one can so well describe the set speech of a dull formalist[B], or the flowing locks of a Dowager,

  “In the manner of Ackermann’s dresses for May.”

His light, agreeable, polished style pierces through the body of the court—­hits off the faded graces of “an Adonis of fifty”, weighs the vanity of fashion in tremulous scales, mimics the grimace of affectation and folly, shews up the littleness of the great, and spears a phalanx of statesmen with its glittering point as with a diamond broach.

  “In choosing songs the Regent named
  ‘Had I a heart for falsehood fram’d:’ 
  While gentle Hertford begg’d and pray’d
  For ‘Young I am, and sore afraid.’”

Nothing in Pope or Prior ever surpassed the delicate insinuation and adroit satire of these lines, and hundreds more of our author’s composition.  We wish he would not take pains to make us think of them with less pleasure than formerly.—­The “Fudge Family” is in the same spirit, but with a little falling-off.  There is too great a mixture of undisguised Jacobinism and fashionable slang.  The “divine Fanny Bias” and “the mountains a la Russe” figure in somewhat quaintly with Buonaparte and the Bourbons.  The poet also launches the lightning of political indignation; but it rather plays round and illumines his own pen than reaches the devoted heads at which it is aimed!

Mr. Moore is in private life an amiable and estimable man.  The embellished and voluptuous style of his poetry, his unpretending origin, and his mignon figure soon introduced him to the notice of the great, and his gaiety, his wit, his good-humour, and many agreeable accomplishments fixed him there, the darling of his friends and the idol of fashion.  If he is no longer familiar with Royalty as with his garter, the fault is not his—­his adherence to his principles caused the separation—­his love