brary were above criticism, but the small thatched cottage, the only residence available, seemed to Moore below even their humble pretensions. To Bessie the thatch, the porch, the garden looked invitingly homelike, and the rent of forty pounds a year for house and furniture had a blessed promise of peace to one already too well acquainted with the certainties of expenditure and the uncertainties of income.

At first the shadow of the big house fell heavily on Bessie's soul. She waited to accept an invitation to Bowood till she could go in the shelter of the poet Bowles and his respectable old wife. But nothing could prevent the wave of isolation that swept over her in that large house, where all the rest of the company were old acquaintances and talked a brilliant idiom she could not master. Manners were more formal in those days, and it was years before Bessie found out that Lady Lansdowne was a woman as humble, devout and tender-hearted as herself, whose secret habit it was to tend the sick and poor with womanly. personal service. At first even Moore was abashed by her restrained manners. It is quite probable that a Woman so good as Lady Lansdowne had misgivings about the translator of Anacreon and the author of Little's Poems. But on nearer acquaintance she convinced herself that there was no shadow of harm in the brilliant little man, while he brought three delightful qualifications into society, an infectious sense of enjoyment, witty and sympathetic talk at table, and afterwards a gift of song that melted his hearers into happy tears. So indispensable a guest did he become at Bowood that his room there was kept always ready. Once when Lord Lansdowne found him unexpectedly a guest at his breakfast table he laughingly compared him to the tramps who do

not know in the morning where they will find their bed in the evening.

About a year after the Moores were settled in their pretty cottage at Sloperton, a baby boy was born, a cause of delight to both parents. After reading the last sad chapters of the Diary one recurs with curious feelings to this cheerful entry: "Walked to Devizes for money; the little Prodigal is no sooner born than money is wanted for him."

Moore would gladly have had Lord Lansdowne for godfather, "but I hate asking and Bessie, who is independence to her heart's core, hates it still more." However, one day when Bessie was asleep in the little drawingroom upstairs and Tom taking his midday dinner with Baby Anastasia in the dining-room, Lord Lansdowne knocked at the door. He had heard of the sudden death of Romilly and was so eager for the sympathy which Moore was always ready to bestow that, when denied at the door, he begged to be allowed to go upstairs to write a note. Should Bessie be disturbed or his Lordship shown into an atmosphere of beef and turnips? Moore was gentleman and humorist enough not to apologize for his surroundings; Lord Lansdowne's heart was full of his dead friend, and in the genial intimacy of that little visit Moore "felt the long thought of request to him to be godfather rising to my tongue... did so and he consented with much kindness." Whether Bessie was perfectly pleased when she woke up and her husband went up to tell her, one has no means of guessing; she was not-so one gathers-apt to be critical of her husband's actions.

So irrepressible were Moore's social instincts that he could no more resist the county ball at Devizes than he could absent himself from the brilliant circle at Bowood. He notes more than once in his diary how, coming home in the small hours, he found Bessie

keeping up the fire, having prepared a nice little supper for him-just as Amelia would have done. It is something that her little kindnesses were never taken for granted by her husband. Delicate health and shyness accounted in part for Bessie's retired life, but there were also toilet difficulties into which her husband entered with unusual understanding for a man. Like a man, too, he only knew one and that an extravagant way out of the difficulties. He acquiesced when the lack of a bonnet prevented his wife from attending the consecration of the chapel at Bowood, but when a ball was in question he was more urgent.

"After a long discussion with the dear girl, in which I in vain endeavored to persuade her to get a new gown for the occasion, she consented to go if I would allow her to go in the old one which, she assured me, was good enough for a poor poet's wife." "The whole affair," he writes later, "was very splendid, and my sweet Bess (though sadly underdressed for the occasion) looked very handsome and enjoyed it all as much as if she had been covered with diamonds."

But Bessie could on occasion also enjoy the peaceful sense and "disinvoltura" that spring from the consciousness of pretty and becoming clothes. It was after their return from France that she and Moore were dining at Bowood, "Bessie looking very handsome in her simple barége." At dinner Moore, looking down the table, saw her happily placed in the kind protection of her constant friend, Lord John Russell, and on the way home she told him in high spirits that after dinner all the women had admired her dress and been very kind to her.

Bessie had her own little hospitalities, too, at the cottage, a dance for instance, where eleven couples "took the floor" in Moore's little study and supped on the champagne and oysters

which, in his lavish fashion, he had ordered down from London.

Publishers and editors were extraordinarily enterprising and generous where Moore was concerned. He himself remarks that the views of poets are matter-of-fact compared to the sanguine imagination of men of business. For "Lalla Rookh" Longmans paid down three thousand pounds, and for the satiric squibs sent to the Times, Moore was paid at the rate of four hundred pounds a year while they lasted. First and last he received more than thirty thousand pounds for his writing, but the money was always being forestalled, and one fears that Moore and his wife were never free from embarrassment. It must be remembered that Moore would never accept the assistance offered freely by his rich friends, and that, at all times, he most generously assisted his relatives in Dublin. But when these facts have been placed to the credit side there remains enough of habitual and meaningless expenditure to have tried the cheerfulness and temper of any other woman. Rogers, who gossiped rather spitefully about the very friends whom he helped so generously, used to assert that Mrs. Moore kept her household on a guinea a week while Moore would spend the same sum in the same time on gloves and hackney cabs.

In Moore's journal the reader meets again and again with monetary crises which make his heart sink with sympathetic anxiety only to find on the next page the poet paying-a little ruefully-twenty-one pounds for his entrance fee at Brooks's, or purring over an overcoat which Mr. Nugee, the fashionable tailor, assured him would confer immortality on maker and wearer. Just as often the extravagance springs from reckless kindness, as when he took two state cabins for Bessie and her two children on their voyage to

Edinburgh and paid fourteen pounds for them. Unlike Scott, Moore could not justify his extravagances by putting more pressure on his work. Such entries as "at work all day," or "nothing to record but a monotony of work,” occur often enough, but, on examining the dates, one finds that these periods of steady work rarely lasted more than "from the 5th till the 9th." More and more as years went on he shrank from periodic literary obligation. He refused a temporary post as leader writer on the Times at a salary of one hundred pounds a month. Once when Bessie in one room was seriously debating whether she could afford herself a fiveshilling fare into Devizes Moore in the study was refusing a thousand pounds offered by a quixotic publisher for a poem one third the length of "Lalla Rookh." To us there seems nothing incongruous in the author of "Paradise and the Peri" editing the "Keepsake" at a salary of seven hundred pounds a year, but Moore was jealous of his dignity and probably wisely so. The fact is, it is my name brings these offers and my name would suffer by açcepting them." If any one may be pardoned for deteriorating under a weight of sordid cares it is a woman who struggles by minute economies to meet expenditure over which she has no control. But Bessie had that natural largeness of nature that nothing can cramp. Speaking of her personal economies, Moore wrote, "but in matters of necessity or generosity or honest credit she will go to the last farthing." When a young friend marries, having no money to buy a present, she must needs send a beautiful tabinet gown, recently received as a gift. Even the recipient writes regretfully, "Why did you not keep your handsome gown for your own handsome self?"

Rarer than generosity is a just perception of the financial rights of others when these clash with our own. VOL. XXXV. 1858

LIVING AGE.

In 1837 Longmans were bringing out the collected edition of Moore's works, and Mrs. Power, the widow of the publisher of the Irish Melodies, demanded a thousand pounds for the copyright. "This the Longmans think too much, and so it probably is; but my dear, generous and just-minded Bess thinks otherwise, and (though she knows a large outlay in that quarter must necessarily trench upon my share of the emolument) hopes most earnestly that Mrs. Power, for the sake of her family, will refuse to take any less. A rare bird is Bess in more ways than one."

She had a pretty, cunning way of economizing by pilfering from the change which the poet left about in his careless manner and then surprising him with the little hoard when he needed some special indulgence. From 1820 to 1822 the Moores were in France -partly in Paris, partly in the neighborhood of Meudon, The defalcation of a man of business had plunged them into difficulty, and they had gone abroad to escape the peculiar horror of the time-a debtors' prison-but they cannot be said to have economized,

From July 1 till October 21 Bessie noted that they had not spent one quiet evening; the only night they dined alone she said, "This is the first rational evening we have spent." In this whirl of engagements Moore was attempting to read up the history of Ancient Egypt for his tale "The Epicurean." He required a certain "Voyage de Pythagore," a book costing three napoleons; but, with a recklessness that recalls Rosamund and the Purple Jar, he must needs take his wife, his daughter, her schoolmistress, and a little schoolfellow to Père la Chaise, give them a dinner at the Cadran Bleu, take them all to the theatre, and end up somewhere with iced punch, an entertainment not generally associated with childhood! Bessie was not a conscien

tious moralist; she had no idea of educating Tom by letting him bear the consequences of his own actions. When he counted the cost of the evening and found it had swallowed up his three napoleons, she told him that she had "saved by little pilferings from him four napoleons, and that he should have them for his book." One can imagine Fielding's Amelia playing this pretty trick on her husband and giving him the money with the same tender smile.

Stifling and agitating as pecuniary troubles are, Bessie had learned to face them with calmness, turning all the energy of her loving nature into contrivance and management. Far heavier sorrows were to fall to her lot. The two little dead daughters were unforgotten. After an interval of ten years the sight of Barbara's grave moved her mother to a passion of tears. In Paris she had her Anastasia, whose graceful dancing was a delight to her father, and little Tom, a beautiful boy like his mother; a year or two later Russell was born, "sweet Buss," his mother's special companion and delight, Moore says of himself that anxiety about his children almost spoilt his pleasure in them. In all troubles, whether of day and way, or the more acute anxieties about health, he knew but one method-he had to throw himself into the social life always so ready to receive him; he was, only too faithfully,

the friend... who Forgot his own griefs to be happy with you.

The griefs were there; when he returned home and met them face to face, they overwhelmed him. Then Bessie

Who could not be unmanned, No! nor outwomaned,

would quietly urge him to return to

that gay life which always served as an anodyne for him. Like Alkestis she rendered all wifely dues to her husband except the dearest and most essential, the claiming support from him. Like Alkestis, too, her most passionate yearning of heart may have been given to the children.

From February 1828 to February 1829 she had watched the decline of Anastasia, a gentle, lovable girl ap proaching the age when an only daughter becomes a second youth to her mother. Within a month of the end Moore writes: "The dreadful truth at last forced itself upon me that there was but little hope for our poor girl. Bessie herself has known (and been wasting away on the knowledge of) it these three weeks, but feared to distress me by telling me of it."

If, reading this saddest of narratives, we are tempted to contrast the mother whose beautiful, worn face looked "always so nice and cheerful" to the restless child waking up in the fire-At small hours, with the father shrinking so painfully from the fear of pain, we must remember that it is from his record that we draw our knowledge of "that perfection of all womanly virtue that exists in my beloved Bessie."

It was an age when evangelical piety sought to turn innocent children into self-conscious saints, and alas! aimed as carefully at preparing young souls for an edifying death-bed as for a useful life. Two generations of religious story-books and biographies attest this tendency. Two weeks before, in a stage-coach, a pretty "little saint" of twelve years old had amused Moore by her zeal for his soul, asking him if he really felt all he wrote in the Sacred Melodies. "Moore shrank," says Lord John Russell, "from disturbing his child's mind with religious preparation, but Mrs. Moore had long before inculcated in her daughter's mind those lessons of piety which she was so well

qualified to impart." Lord John's warm regard for his friend's wife rings true and serious through all his formal phrasing.

During that last fortnight Moore dedicated to the dying girl all the social charm and entertaining ways that the world found so irresistible. "What nice evenings we have," the child would say contentedly. She was her father's child, with his sensibility and his gift of music. "Shall I try to sing, mamma?" she asked one night. "Do, my love"; and she immediately began her father's little Bacchanalian song with its curiously pathetic opening line When in death I shall calmly recline.

Intent only on keeping her arms round the child and warding off from her the terrors and pains of death, Bessie hardly felt her own anguish, and even in the darkest of the valley she had thought for her husband, who, in some ways was as much her child as the dying girl on her bosom. When it came near the end, "Bessie knowing what an effect (through my whole life) it would have on me, implored me not to be present at it."

Unfaltering, with her tender cheerful voice, she answered the child's wild cry, "I shall die, I shall die!" with the simple words "We pray to God continually for you, my dear Anastasia, and I am sure God must love you because you have always been a good girl."

Even at the very end, when she called Moore in to take his last goodbye, she held her beautiful head between his sight and the death-stricken child, that his memory should carry away no painful image of the young face he loved. But to herself so dear was the wasted little body that she would suffer no one else to do the last offices. She laid her snowdrops in the coffin and then turned again to her great task of loving and upholding and consoling.

Henceforth she was, like Job, "to sit as chief. . . as one that comforteth mourners."

Wherever there was sorrow or sickness she had the right of free entry. She and her husband were to dine at Lacock Abbey, one of the great places in the neighborhood of her home, and Bessie, already dressed, walked over to the curate's house to find him dangerously ill and the family in great distress. Moore had to go to his party alone and, returning home next morning, found that his wife had been up all night with the sick man. When next she dined at Lacock Abbey, the hostess, Lady Elizabeth Fielding, whispered mischievously to Moore, "I suppose there is nobody dying in your neighborhood or we should not have had Mrs. Moore here to-day." Poor Lady Elizabeth, she herself had always found it "such an agreeable world and so pleasant to live in" that she had been impatient of those who found it sad, yet when her time came to sit among mourners, in the first hours of sorrow it was to Bessie Moore and to her alone that she turned for the comfort that no one else could afford.

There were many pleasant things in Bessie's quiet days at Sloperton. Country life, that finer fleur of English civilization, was probably never more attractive than in the twenties and thirties of the last century. The country had not as yet been invaded by industries; old cottages, old farms, old manor houses, old gardens, gave color and a pleasant flavor of antiquity to the fair, green, prosperous landscape. The small socialities of a country neighborhood, the kindly intimacies of those who lived within easy reach and met often without effort or ceremony, made up a life which seems very peaceful and charming as we find it in novels and story-books of the period. Benevolence performed its simple