THOMAS MOORE.—­Emphatically the creature of his age, Moore wrote sentimental songs in melodious language to the old airs of Ireland, and used them as an instrument to excite the Irish people in the struggle they were engaged in against English misgovernment.  But his songs were true neither to tradition nor to nature; they placed before the ardent Celtic fancy an Irish glory and grandeur entirely different from the reality.  Nor had he in any degree caught the bardic spirit.  His lyre was attuned to reach the ear rather than the heart; his scenes are in enchanted lands; his dramatis personae tread theatrical boards; his thunder is a melo-dramatic roll; his lightning is pyrotechny; his tears are either hypocritical or maudlin; and his laughter is the perfection of genteel comedy.

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin, on the 28th of May, 1779:  he was a diminutive but precocious child, and was paraded by his father and mother, who were people in humble life, as a reciter of verse; and as an early rhymer also.  His first poem was printed in a Dublin magazine, when he was fourteen years old.  In 1794 he entered Trinity College, Dublin; and, although never considered a good scholar, he was graduated in 1798, when he was nineteen years old.

ANACREON.—­The first work which brought him into notice, and which manifests at once the precocity of his powers and the peculiarity of his taste, was his translation of the Odes of Anacreon.  He had begun this work while at college, but it was finished and published in London, whither he had gone after leaving college, to enter the Middle Temple, in order to study law.  With equal acuteness and adaptation to character, he dedicated the poems to the Prince of Wales, an anacreontic hero.  As might be expected, with such a patron, the volume was a success.  In 1801 he published another series of erotic poems, under the title The Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little.  This gained for him, in Byron’s line, the name of “the young Catullus of his day”; and, at the instance of Lord Moira, he was appointed poet-laureate, a post he filled only long enough to write one birthday ode.  What seemed a better fortune came in the shape of an appointment as Registrar of the Admiralty Court of Bermuda.  He went to the island; remained but a short time; and turned over the uncongenial duties of the post to a deputy, who subsequently became a defaulter, and involved Moore to a large amount.  Returning from Bermuda, he travelled in the United States and Canada; not without some poetical record of his movements.  In 1806 he published his Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, which called down the righteous wrath of the Edinburgh Review:  Jeffrey denounced the book as “a public nuisance,” and “a corrupter of public morals.”  For this harsh judgment, Moore challenged him; but the duel was stopped by the police.  This hostile meeting was turned to ridicule by Byron in the lines: 

    When Little’s leadless pistols met his eye,
    And Bow-street myrmidons stood laughing by.