The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore | Page 2

society, took him up with friendly warmth, and
he soon found himself a well-accepted guest in the highest circles in
London. No clever young fellow--without any advantage of birth or of
person, and with intellectual attractions which seem to posterity to be
of a rather middling kind--ever won his way more easily or more

cheaply into that paradise of mean ambitions, the beau monde. Moore
has not escaped the stigma which attaches to almost all men who thus
succeeded under the like conditions--that of tuft-hunting and lowering
compliances. He would be a bold man who should affirm that there was
absolutely no sort of ground for the charge; or that Moore--fêted at
Holland House, and hovered-round by the fashionable of both sexes,
the men picking up his witticisms, and the women languishing over his
songs--was capable of the same sturdy self-reliance and simple
adhesion to principle which might possibly have been in him, and
forthcoming from him, under different conditions. Who shall touch
pitch and not be defiled,--who treacle, and not be sweetened? At the
same time, it is easy to carry charges of this kind too far, and not
always through motives the purest and most exalted. It may be said
without unfairness on either side that the sort of talents which Moore
possessed brought him naturally into the society which he frequented;
that very possibly the world has got quite as much out of him by that
development of his faculties as by any other which they could have
been likely to receive; and that he repaid patronage in the coin of
amusement and of bland lenitives, rather than in that of obsequious
adulation. For we are not required nor permitted to suppose that there
was the stuff of a hero in "little Tom Moore;" or that the lapdog of the
drawing-room would under any circumstances have been the
wolf-hound of the public sheepfold. In the drawing-room he is a sleeker
lapdog, and lies upon more and choicelier-clothed laps than he would
in "the two-pair back;" and that is about all that needs to be said or
speculated in such a case. As a matter of fact, the demeanor of Moore
among the socially great seems to have been that of a man who
respected his company, without failing to respect himself also--any
ill-natured caviling or ready-made imputations to the contrary
notwithstanding.
In 1802 Moore produced his first volume of original verse, the
_Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little_ (an allusion to the author's
remarkably small stature), for which he received £60. There are in this
volume some erotic improprieties, not of a very serious kind either in
intention or in harmfulness, which Moore regretted in later years. Next
year Lord Moira procured him the post of Registrar to the Admiralty

Court of Bermuda; he embarked on the 25th of September, and reached
his destination in January 1804. This work did not suit him much better
than the business of the bar; in March he withdrew from personal
discharge of the duties: and, leaving a substitute in his place, he made a
tour in the United States and Canada. He was presented to Jefferson,
and felt impressed by his republican simplicity. Such a quality,
however, was not in Moore's line; and nothing perhaps shows the
essential smallness of his nature more clearly than the fact that his visit
to the United States, in their giant infancy, produced in him no glow of
admiration or aspiration, but only a recrudescence of the commonest
prejudices--the itch for picking little holes, the petty joy of reporting
them, and the puny self-pluming upon fancied or factitious superiorities.
If the washy liberal patriotism of Moore's very early years had any
vitality at all, such as would have qualified it for a harder struggle than
jeering at the Holy Alliance, and singing after-dinner songs of national
sentimentalism to the applause of Whig lords and ladies, this American
experience may beheld to have been its death-blow. He now saw
republicans face to face; and found that they were not for him, nor he
for them. He returned to England in 1806; and soon afterwards
published his Odes and Epistles, comprising many remarks, faithfully
expressive of his perceptions, on American society and manners.
The volume was tartly criticised in the Edinburgh Review by Jeffrey,
who made some rather severe comments upon the improprieties
chargeable to Moore's early writings. The consequence was a challenge,
and what would have been a duel at Chalk Farm, but for unloaded
pistols and police interference. This fiasco soon led to an amicable
understanding between Moore and Jeffrey; and a few years later, about
the end of 1811, to a friendship of closer intimacy between the Irish
songster and his great poetic contemporary Lord Byron. His lordship,
in his youthful satire of English