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THOMAS MOORE

Life of Byron

Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, was born in Dublin on May 28, 1779, was educated at Trinity College, and studied for the Bar at the Middle Temple.  At twenty-one years of age he published a translation of Anacreon, and his reputation was further established by his love-poems, under the pseudonym of Thomas Little, in 1801.  He received in 1803 an official post in Bermuda, but entrusted his duties there to a substitute, by whose defalcations he was later embarrassed.  He was married at thirty-one to a beautiful and amiable actress, Bessy Dyke, and lived very happily for most of his life in Wiltshire, but with an interval of a few years in Paris.  In 1835 he received a literary pension of L300, to which a Civil List pension of L100 was added in 1850.  He died on February 25, 1852.  Undoubtedly, Moore’s most important contribution to prose literature was his “Letters and Journals of Lord Byron,” published in 1830, six years after the poet’s death; as payment he received L4,200.  Although the work was frankly and even severely criticised in many quarters, it did a great deal to put Byron right with public opinion.  Certainly no literary contemporary was better fitted to write the biography of his friend than Moore, who, moreover, had been marked for this work by a free gift of Byron’s own memoirs.

I.—­Ancestors and Early Days

It has been said of Lord Byron that he was prouder of being a descendant of those Byrons of Normandy, who accompanied William the Conqueror into England, than of having been the author of “Childe Harold.”  The remark is not altogether unfounded, for the pride of ancestry was a feature of his character; and justly so, for his line was honourably known on the fields of Cressy, Bosworth, and Marston Moor; and in the faithful royalist, Sir John Biron, afterwards Lord Biron, throughout the Civil Wars.

In 1784, the father of the poet, Captain John Byron, nephew of the fifth Lord Byron, with the sole object of relieving his debts, married, as his second wife, Miss Catherine Gordon, a wealthy lady of illustrious Scottish ancestry.  Her fortune was swallowed up, and she was reduced to L150 a year, before she gave birth, on January 22, 1788, in Holles Street, London, to her first and only child, George Gordon Byron.  The boy was somewhat deformed, one of his feet being twisted.

In 1790, we find the unhappy parents living in separate lodgings in Aberdeen; and this estrangement was followed by complete separation, the worthless Captain Byron proceeding to France, where he died in the following year.  The mother, a woman of the most passionate extremes, sent the boy to day school and grammar school.  His schoolmates remember him as lively, warm-hearted, and more ready to give a blow than to take one.  To summer excursions with his mother in the Highlands the poet traces his love of scenery and especially of mountainous countries; and he refers many years after, still with keen feeling, to a little girl, Mary Duff, for whom, in his eighth year, he cherished a consuming attachment.  So early were his sensibilities dominant.