And so exact is the resemblance between the spirit of the Irish Melodies and that which reigns in this Asiatic epic, that it was possible to employ a sentence from the latter, without the change of a single word, as motto for the collection of documents relating to the Irish Rebellion which was published in the Fifties under the title: Rebellion Book and Black History. The lines are as follows:

"Rebellion foul, dishonouring word,

Whose wrongful blight so oft has stained
The holiest cause that tongue or sword

Of mortal ever lost or gained.

How many a spirit born to bless

Hath sunk beneath that withering name,

Whom but a day's, an hour's success
Had wafted to eternal fame ! "

It was Moore's polemical position as an Irishman that made it impossible for him to see European politics in the same light as they appeared to the Lake School and Scott. He directed a shower of the arrows of his wit against the Holy Alliance. In the Fables for the Holy Alliance, which he dedicated to Lord Byron, he jests, good-humouredly but audaciously, at the European reaction. He dreams, for example, that Czar Alexander gives a splendid ball in an ice-palace which he has erected on the frozen Neva, on the plan of that built by the Empress Anne. To it are invited all the "holy gentlemen" who, at the various Congresses, have shown such regard for the welfare of Europe.

"The thought was happy, and designed

To hint how thus the human mind
May-like the stream imprisoned there—
Be checked and chilled till it can bear
The heaviest Kings, that ode or sonnet
E'er yet be-praised, to dance upon it."

Madame de Krüdener has pledged her prophetic word that there is no danger, that the ice will never melt. But, lo! ere long an ill-omened dripping begins. The Czar goes on with his polonaise, but so glassy has the floor become that he can hardly keep his legs; and Prussia, "though to slippery ways so used, was cursedly near tumbling." But

hardly has the Spanish fandango begun when a glaring light-" as 'twere a glance shot from an angry southern sun' -begins to shine in every chamber of the palace. Then there is a general "Sauve qui peut!" Instantly everything is in a flow-royal arms, Russian and Prussian birds of prey and French fleur-de-lys, floors, walls, and ceilings, kings, fiddlers, emperors, all are gone. Why, asks Moore,

"Why, why will monarchs caper so

In palaces without foundations?"

It is evident that he hoped great things from the Spanish Revolution, which had just begun.

In another fable he tells of a country where there was a ridiculous law prohibiting the importation of looking-glasses. What was the reason of this prohibition? The reason was that the royal race reigned by right of their superior beauty, and the people obeyed because they were declared, and believed themselves to be, ugly. To hint that the King's nose was not straight, was high treason; to suggest that one's own neighbour was as good-looking as certain persons in high position, was almost as great a crime; and the subjects, never having seen looking-glasses, did not know themselves. Certain wicked Radicals arranged that a ship with a cargo of looking-glasses should be driven ashore on this country's coast-and the reader guesses the rest. In a third fable the poet returns to his old symbolic characters, the Fireworshippers. Less tolerant here than in Lalla Rookh, he makes the Fire - worshippers throw the whole corps of "extinguishers," who have been appointed to obstruct them in the peaceful exercise of their religious rites, into the flames which they will not allow to burn.

The work which shows Moore's humour and satire at its best, The Fudge Family in Paris, is full of witty sallies against the new, incapable Bourbon Government, but strikes at England in bold, dead earnest. We find such lines as:

"Everywhere gallant hearts, and spirits true,
Are served up victims to the vile and few ;
While E, everywhere-the general foe
Of truth and freedom, wheresoe'er they glow-
Is first, when tyrants strike, to aid the blow!"

And England is reminded that

66

maledictions ring from every side

Upon that grasping power, that selfish pride,

Which vaunts its own, and scorns all rights beside."

The Fourth and Seventh Letters ought to be read, with their jeers at the Prince Regent's laziness and corpulence, and their abuse of Castlereagh, of whom Moore thus writes:

"We sent thee C―gh; as heaps of dead

Have slain their slayers by the pest they spread,
So hath our land breathed out-thy fame to dim,
Thy strength to waste, and rot thee, soul and limb-
Her worst infections all condensed in him!"

And the potentates of the Holy Alliance are called

"That royal, ravening flock, whose vampire wings
O'er sleeping Europe treacherously brood,
And fan her into dreams of promised good,

Of hope, of freedom-but to drain her blood !"

This sounds very bad and very dangerous; the distance separating such a writer from the older generation of poets strikes us as great; it seems but a step from this to Shelley and Byron. But as a matter of fact, it is a long way; for all these attacks are not quite so seriously meant as one would imagine. This champion of the cause of Ireland was no advocate of her independence; Moore did not desire the separation of his country from England; he only desired that she should be ruled better and more justly. This bold denouncer of kings was no republican, but a sincere believer in monarchy, who would have had bad kings replaced by good ones. He was no free-thinker, this man who railed so violently at the hypocrisy of the Holy Alliance, but a sincere, enlightened Catholic, who, though he brought up his children as Protestants, wrote a thick book, Travels of an Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion, in defence of the most important doctrines of the Catholic faith. With all his apparent unrestraint, Moore kept within the bounds prescribed by the society in which he lived. The Whig

leaders had, when he came to London, received him with open arms, and Moore became and remained the Whig poet, who in a long series of playfully sarcastic letters-rhymed feuilletons one might call them-treated the public questions and Parliamentary events of the day with sparkling wit and drawing-room humour of the best style, in the spirit of the Whig party.

XIII

EROTIC LYRIC POETRY

MOORE was by nature disposed to gaiety and happiness, not to solitary conflict. He was created to occupy, in the manner of the ancient Irish bards, an honourable place at the table of the great, and while away their time with song. A sign of his being one of fortune's favourites is that he often jests even when he is most in earnest, unlike Byron, who, even when he jests, is serious, nay, gloomy. Moore plays with his theme and caresses it; Byron tears his to pieces, and turns from it in disgust. The two friends are constantly observing and reproducing nature; but under Byron's gaze the sun itself seems to be darkened, whilst Moore, with his love of rosy red and brightness and sparkle, himself creates "a morning sun which rises at noon."

Hence we get but a one-sided picture of Moore when we study him, as our plan has led us to do, chiefly as a political poet. He is also the writer of some of the best and most musical erotic lyrics in existence. The music of his verse is more exuberant than delicate; but there is magic in his handling of language. In his love poems a fascinating, glowing sensuousness and an ardent tenderness have found expression in word-melodies which are as tuneful as airs by Rossini. English admirers of Shelley, accustomed to more delicate, and, to the uninitiated, more perplexing harmonies, may, if they please, call these songs "oversweet"; erotic verse cannot be too erotic; as the French say: "In love too much is not enough." Moore is no Mozart; but is this not almost like a Mozart air, like one of the hero's or Zerlina's in Don Juan?

"The young May-moon is beaming, love!
The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love!
How sweet to rove

Through Morna's grove,

While the drowsy world is dreaming, love!"