THE some time expected death of THOMAS dies, too-exquisite as is their word-music-fanciMOORE occurred on the 26th of February, at ful as is their conception-delightful as is their Sloperton Cottage, near Devizes. Like Southey playfulness, and touching as is their pathos-even and Scott, the British Anacreon had for several the Irish Melodies, we believe are declining in years before his decease, quite lost his intelligence, popular estimation. The reasons are obvious. In and he lingered in seclusion, and in half slumber- the first place, the Irish Melodies are not particuing unconsciousness, personally well nigh forgotten larly Irish; they have grace, sparkling fancy, deby the world. His history is little more than a licious feeling; but they are too fine-spun to do history of his writings. He was deservedly pop- the work-a-day duty of popular songs. As literary ular in society, for his amiable qualities, and fas- performances, nine-tenths of Burns's are inferior cinating manners; he shared the intimacy of the to Moore's; and all Dibdin's are immeasurably greatest men and greatest writers of his age, beneath them. Yet the probability is that When more prolific of eminent characters than any other Willie Brewed, and Poor Tom Bowling, will be since that of Shakspeare, Raleigh, and Sidney; in the full tide of popularity, where Rich and and dividing his time between the quiet charms Rare, and Oh Breathe not His Name, will be unof domestic ease, and the smiles of the most ele- sung and forgotten. In a certain circle, and vated classes, he may be said to have been a for- among people of a certain reading and apprecitunate and happy man. As a song writer, he ation, Moore will live as long as the language; was doubtless unrivalled. His versification is ex- but his genius was delicate and acute rather than quisitely finished, harmonious, and musically toned. catholic and strong. He had a rich play of fancy, The sense is never obviously sacrificed to the but none of the soaring imagination of Shelley or sound; on the contrary, he delighted in that spe- Byron. His mind, in fact, was a first-class secondcies of antithetical and epigramatic turn, which is rate. It had no pretensions to stand in the line generally held to excuse some roughness, and to of the giants of his time. Brightly fanciful, rabe scarcely compatible with perfect melody of ther than continuously imaginative-teeming with rhythm. In grace, both of thought and diction, poetic imagery-loving to sparkle along the in easy, fluent wit, in melody, in brilliancy of floweriest paths, and beneath the balmiest skies fancy, in warmth (but scarcely depth) of senti--revelling always in fays and flowers-in love, ment, and even in purity and simplicity, when he chose to be pure and simple, no one has been superior to Moore; but in grandeur of conception, power of thought, and above all, unity of purpose, and a high aim, he was singularly deficient, and these are necessary to the character, not of a sweet minstrel, but of a great poet.

The London Morning Chronicle furnishes a biography of Moore, which we slightly abridge. With him, says the Chronicle, is snapped the last tie, save perhaps one, represented by the veteran Rogers, which connects the present generation with the outburst of "all the talents" which sig nalized the opening of the century. That great kindling of genius-embracing almost all sides of imaginative literature, of criticism and philosophy -is becoming more a thing of history than of fact. Year by year, the lights are going out. Wordsworth was the last extinguished before Moore; and now, to all intents and purposes, the great galaxy which poured such a flood of light on the literature of fifty years ago-which extinguished Rosa Matilda fiction and Della Cruscan poetry-substituted true criticism for technical carping upon philological points, and established new styles in every branch of the belles-lettresthis great constellation may now be said to have disappeared. One of the brightest, if not of the largest stars, has long been obscured, and is now quite put out. The fame of Moore is fairly a matter of discussion. It cannot, we believe, be denied that much of his serious and more ambitious verse, founded on promptings of a more luscious and florid fancy than the present tastes incline to admit, and no inconsiderable portion even of his lyric pieces,-refined to attenuation-are less read and admired than they were a score or thirty years ago. A severer and sterner school of poetry has succeeded-one of deeper feeling and more sober thought; and the representatives of those who revelled in Lalla Rookh, and delighted in the strains of Mr. Little, now generally address themselves to more staid and philosophic musings. The Irish Melo

and mingled intellectual and sensual pleasures— playful in the extreme, and always ready to stop to make mirth as joyous and as delightful as the passion-his muse, in his great romantic poems, is the incarnation of a charming Epicureanism; and the mirth and jolity could go a long step further. He had wit, which sparkled as brightly as it could cut deeply; and humor, and sense of the ludicrous, which could be as well, if not more effectually applied to living persons and actual things than to the creations of his own fancy; and accordingly we find him loving to turn from the etherealized voluptuousness of Loves of the Angels, or the mystic imaginings of the Epicurean, to the sharp and brilliant hittings of political and social squibs-the restless satire with which, in the Fudge Family and hundreds of ephemeral but not the less clever lays, he quizzed his political and literary opponents, abolished the Earl of Mountcashell, or shot stinging shafts through the heart of the Benthamites. It is, indeed, far from probable that Moore's political and satiric poetry, little perhaps as he thought of it at the time, will live after his more ambitious works have sunk into that chronic state of classicism, in which books are labelled with an excellent character, and shelved-turned into the category of works without which no gentleman's library is complete, and doomed, not to actual obscurity, but to honorable retirement. The last of his political squibs and short poems were given to the world in the columns of the Morning Chronicle, and referred principally to the earlier struggles of the AntiCorn Law League-the verses having in most cases been suggested by passing political events.

Thomas Moore died at the ripe age of seventytwo. He was born on the 28th of May, 1780, in Angier-street, Dublin, where his father, a strict Roman Catholic, carried on a grocery and spirit business. As a child, he is said to have been remarkable for personal beauty; but his appearance in after life hardly carried out the promise of infancy. He was short, with a heavy, expressive,

character, as well as great beauty and amiability. Their children are all dead.

A couple of political satires of no great meritone setting forth a sober and earnest panegyric upon ignorance-were followed by the famous Two-penny Post Bag, a bundle of rollicking satire and humor. It made a great hit. Not so its author's next venture, a farce called the Blue Stocking, damned at the Lyceum. Moore's intimacy with Byron and Hunt was broken off by the outspoken tone of the Liberal, and especially by the Vision of Judgment. Moore thought his friends had gone too far. What would Carlton House say? For if, as Byron said, "Little Tommy dearly loved a lord," with how much more affection did he worship a prince of the blood royal?

but not handsome face, which, however, lightened up wonderfully when conversing or singing his own ballads. He was educated at Dublin, and one of his first noted peculiarities was a fondness and a talent for private theatricals. Taking advantage of the boon, as it was then considered, the young Roman Catholic was entered at Trinity College. He could not, of course, obtain a degree; but some English verses tendered at an examination, in lieu of the usual Latin composition, procured a copy of the Travels of Anacharsis, as a reward. The wild times of the Irish rebellion were approaching, and the poet was naturally to be found in the ranks led by the Emmetts and Arthur O'Connor; but his treasonable lucubrations, though, as his own sister remarked, “rather strong," were passed over without any measures The Melodies were his next, and perhaps most against the enthusiastic young champion of liberty. popular compositions. Charming as they are, Politics, however, were by no means the only sub- and exquisitely finished as is their lyrical workject of his muse. At the age of fourteen he pub-manship, we doubt whether they have the stamina lished poetry in a Dublin magazine, and afterwards composed many semi-burlesque pieces for private representation.

In his twentieth year, giving up republicanism for ever, Moore came to London to study at the Middle Temple, and publish his translations, or rather paraphrases, of Anacreon. As may be imagined, he attended much more to the Greek than to Coke upon Lyttleton, and permission, obtained through the friendship of Lord Moira, to dedicate the work to the Prince Regent, was the means of his introduction to those elevated circles in which he was afterwards to move and shine. His Anacreon was highly successful, and was succeeded, in 1801, by Poems and Songs, by Thomas Little. Whatever objections may be raised by the present generation to either of these works, there can be no doubt of their vivid play of fancy, their singular grace, even when verging on improprieties, and their exquisite melody of versification. His translations of the Old Greek Lover, and of Women and Wine, are probably the finest and richest versions of these often rendered songs in the English language—always excepting the rough but thoroughly racy version of the last, by quaint old Mr. Donne.

and heart-rooted earnestness, which are requisite to make songs immortal. Only the strongest heart and the manliest brain produce offspring to suit all tastes and to last all time.

It was in 1812 that Moore determined to write an Indian poem. Mr. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, accompanied the poet to the Messis. Longman, and through his intervention the great sum of 3,000 guineas was settled on as the price of a piece of which not one word was yet written. Moore then retired to Mayfield Cottage, a desolate place in Derbyshire, and after a long and hard struggle with a coquettish muse-after a three years retirement-he sent forth Lalla Rookh. Its success was immense; the poem ran rapidly through several editions, and Moore's fame stood upon a higher and surer pedestal than ever. The tales were the triumph of poetic lusciousness; but not a few old judges stigmatized their taste by preferring Fadladeen and his criticisms, even to the Fireworshippers, or the tribulations of the Peri. We need hardly say that the judgment of these tough critics has now a far greater number of adherents than it once commanded.

After a continental tour, Moore wrote the clever and popular Fudge Family. In the following year In the days of the regency, poets came in for he met Byron in Italy, and then the latter intrustpatronage, and Mr. Moore, made registrar to the ed to him his memoirs for publication. These Court of Admiralty at Bermuda-as singularly memoirs Moore sold to Murray for two thousand appropriate an appointment as some we have seen guineas; but, as is well known and a good deal in our own day-went out to the islands, appoint- regretted, the purchase money was refunded, and ed a deputy, took a glance at the United States, the papers regained, and destroyed. Pecuniary difand came home again. He then published ficulties connected with the misconduct of his BerSketches of Travel and Society beyond the Atlan- muda deputy, about this time, compelled Moore tic-a satiric work in heroic verse, vigorously writ- to seek a temporary refuge in Paris, and there he ten, but politically evincing a miserable short-led a pleasant social life, such as he loved, and sightedness. Soon afterwards, a savage review in the Edinburgh, of a republication of Juvenile Songs, &c., led to the celebrated rencontre between Moore and Jeffrey, at Hampstead, when the great critic, as Byron asserted, stood valiantly up: "When Little's leadless pistol met his eye

And Bow-street myrmidons stood laughing by." The affair was ultimately arranged, mainly through the intervention of Mr. Rogers, and at his house Moore shortly afterwards made his first acquaintance with Byron and Campbell. The long and affectionate intimacy between Moore and the author of Childe Harold, we need here only allude to. Moore had about this time married. His wife was a Miss Dyke, a woman of strong sense and

composed the Loves of the Angels, which is not much more than an elaborate and carefully wrought repetition of all his previous love-andflower poetry. The whole thing is dreamy, lulling, and beautiful, but vague and misty. The words tinkle like falling fountains, and the essence of the closing fancy floats about one like perfume; but this enervating species of composition is far from high or true poetry, and accordingly the work is now far oftener alluded to than it is read. In Paris he occupied the same hotel for a long time with his intimate friend Washington Irving.

In 1825 Moore paid a visit to Scott, who pronounced the Irish melodist the "prettiest warbler" he had ever heard. One evening Scott and his

Ladies' Fashions for April.