and grandeur.  His mind does not brood over the great and permanent; it glances over the surfaces, the first impressions of things, instead of grappling with the deep-rooted prejudices of the mind, its inveterate habits, and that “perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.”  His pen, as it is rapid and fanciful, wants momentum and passion.  It requires the same principle to make us thoroughly like poetry, that makes us like ourselves so well, the feeling of continued identity.  The impressions of Mr. Moore’s poetry are detached, desultory, and physical.  Its gorgeous colours brighten and fade like the rainbow’s.  Its sweetness evaporates like the effluvia exhaled from beds of flowers!  His gay laughing style, which relates to the immediate pleasures of love or wine, is better than his sentimental and romantic vein.  His Irish melodies are not free from affectation and a certain sickliness of pretension.  His serious descriptions are apt to run into flowery tenderness.  His pathos sometimes melts into a mawkish sensibility, or crystallizes into all the prettinesses of allegorical language, and glittering hardness of external imagery.  But he has wit at will, and of the first quality.  His satirical and burlesque poetry is his best:  it is first-rate.  His Twopenny Post-Bag is a perfect “nest of spicery”; where the Cayenne is not spared.  The politician there sharpens the poet’s pen.  In this too, our bard resembles the bee—­he has its honey and its sting.

Mr. Moore ought not to have written Lalla Rookh, even for three thousand guineas.  His fame is worth more than that.  He should have minded the advice of Fadladeen.  It is not, however, a failure, so much as an evasion and a consequent disappointment of public expectation.  He should have left it to others to break conventions with nations, and faith with the world.  He should, at any rate, have kept his with the public.  Lalla Rookh is not what people wanted to see whether Mr. Moore could do; namely, whether he could write a long epic poem.  It is four short tales.  The interest, however, is often high-wrought and tragic, but the execution still turns to the effeminate and voluptuous side.  Fortitude of mind is the first requisite of a tragic or epic writer.  Happiness of nature and felicity of genius are the pre-eminent characteristics of the bard of Erin.  If he is not perfectly contented with what he is, all the world beside is.  He had no temptation to risk any thing in adding to the love and admiration of his age, and more than one country.

      “Therefore to be possessed with double pomp,
      To guard a title that was rich before,
      To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
      To throw a perfume on the violet,
      To smooth the ice, or add another hue
      Unto the rainbow, or with taper light
      To seek the beauteous eye of heav’n to garnish,
      Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”

The same might be said of Mr. Moore’s seeking to bind an epic crown, or the shadow of one, round his other laurels.