there "generally came with my sister a number of young girls to meet me, and, full of smiles and welcome, walked by the side of my pony into the town!"

There is no binding element in Moore's existence. It is a rope of sand, made up of the petty engagements of the day. He has no objects in life but to provide for its continuance, and to enjoy it as it goes. There is no continuity in his mind either. He is never establishing any truths, making any permanent deductions from his experience. He always seems to begin the day just where he was yesterday; his mind is the same at fiveand-twenty and at sixty. He never seems, even in his literary labours, to feel the least real interest in his subject. He is absorbed in thinking how he shall do it so as to get the most praise and money. It is the very

spirit of the schoolboy, who gets up his Tacitus and Sophocles for the sake of a high place in his class, and has no idea that they deserve to be studied for their own sake. His diary is only worth reading all through to give you a thorough idea of the self-occupation, the restlessness, and the incessant pursuit of small excitements, which distinguish the writer; and to say that it is worth perusing on this account, is to presuppose that you are willing to make some effort to gain a vivid idea of Tom Moore's frivolity. Its pages are filled throughout with the same eternal round of personal engagements, lists of people he saw or dined with, little disconnected scraps of conversation; containing some bit of information that struck him, or some oddity that made him laugh many of them curious and amusing enough. But there is no colour in the thing; he never reproduces the people and the scenes among which he is living. The least interesting and most wearisome reading of all forms of narrative is that which is at once minute and naked, which tells you every incident without any of that fullness of surrounding circumstance which alone can give it life. This style a diary almost necessarily

assumes; the fact of the day, that you walked in the fields, that Lord Lansdowne called, or that you had cutlets for dinner, seems at the time (at least it did so to Moore) sufficiently important to be noted in your diary: it is not, however, important enough to dwell upon, and a habit is contracted of noting every thing down in a brief skeleton form, especially as writing a diary soon becomes a bore, and as the times when you are really engaged in matters of importance are just those when you have least leisure to give an account of them. The diary of a man of thought, who uses it as a memorandumbook of what passes in his mind, or the diary of a man in important action, which forms a framework that may be filled up from other sources, and gives clues in various directions to the actions of others,-these may be valuable; but the diary of a literary man who doesn't think, can rarely be worth keeping, and that of a dinerout still less so. Not but that each of them may have valuable experiences to record; but that day after day can scarcely demand an historical record of its own. Let such men write their own memoirs, by all means; but we implore them not to keep diaries. Somebody will insist on publishing them whole, and a discontented generation will have to read them. Gray kept a daily record of the weather. We wonder it has never been published as a contribution to his life.

The incessant allusions in Moore's diary to the effect of his works and of his singing, the anxious collection of every little tribute to his success,-have been said to be evidence, not so much of vanity as of a humility which required these supports. They spring really from the fact that what he did had no value of its own to him. He measured every thing simply by its power of commanding this sort of applause. He was not one of those men who, having work to do, do it, and pass their own judgment on what they have done; who use the opinions of others only as correctives of their own; who

smile when they are unjustly condemned, and feel uneasy when they are unjustly praised. Moore lived on the favouring breath of his readers. A credit at Longmans' and the applause of the coteries were the alpha and omega of his literary ambition. But though he had little or none of the artist's love of his work, or pride in it for its own sake, his temper as a man required that the sort of applause he courted should be such as the world esteemed best worth having, and that the pay should come from quarters that ranked highest in social standing. In his later years, while occupied with the uncongenial and burdensome History of Ireland, on which he exhausted the energies of his last working days, we find him refusing offers of employment much better adapted to the natural rank and order of his genius, but which he declined as derogatory to his social and literary standing. He was offered 5007-7007. a year to edit the Keepsake-10007. a year to write it all, 1007. for a hundred lines, 600l. for 120 pages. No, he would none of it. "The fact is," he says, "it is my name brings these offers; and my name would suffer by accepting them." It was with difficulty he was induced to accept (and he limited his acceptance to one year) Captain Marryat's munificent offer of 500l. a year for contributions to the Metropolitan just so often as it might suit him to give them, stipulating only for something in each of the three next numbers. Though writing was purely a profession to him, he never at any time grasped at gain, or balanced between large profits and a high and unblemished reputation. He had always, moreover, a pleasure in executing his work well, and a very conscientious anxiety to justify confidence reposed in his powers.

Moore's genius and his heart stand in remarkable contrast. The one, with all its brilliancy, tact, and effectiveness, is in truth superficial in its character, and strikes no deep root; while the restlessness of his tem

perament, his sensitiveness to passing emotions, his airy gaiety and cheerful spirits, are based on real depth of affectionateness and fidelity: and hence it came that while he supported adverse fortune and struggled through limited means with unfailing courage and cheerfulness, the gradual loss by death of all who were most dear to him, except his wife, of every relative that he had in the world, shattered his health and overwhelmed his spirits.

His Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion, a book which ought to give us some insight into the character of Moore's faith, is written more under an Irish inspiration than a Catholic one. It is a defence of the Catholic religion, hedging the controversy between it and Protestantism within very narrow limits, and conducting it within these limits on a very narrow basis. There are two ways of arguing all questions: one is, to attempt to grasp in its fullness the real case of your adversary, to pierce to the real ground on which he supports his convictions, to find the elements of truth which are embraced in it, and to follow the edge of that delicate boundary along which it melts into error, this is the mode which a powerful mind, with strong convictions of its own, and a desire to convince minds of another class, will naturally pursue. The other course is, to direct exclusive attention to what seem the weakest points of an adversary's case; to batter away at these; to strip away the finer suggestions of words, and insist on holding them to their naked grammatical meaning, uninfluenced by the tone of the connection and the character of the writer's mind; to snatch at small advantages; to appeal to the prejudices of your own party instead of the candour of the other; in short, to harass the suburbs, instead of compelling a surrender by parallels and regular approaches. The Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion is an instance of the latter mode of argument. It is a laborious array of what the writer thinks the weak

points of Protestantism, among which the facts that Luther drank beer and thought he saw the devil hold a prominent place. It is an array of citations to show that the early Fathers believed in the Real Presence ; an attempt to impugn the principle of private judgment by enumerating the various sects into which Protestantism has branched, and by setting up the results of German investigation as a bugbear to frighten us from an open perusal of the Bible. It is curious how easily Moore adapts himself to the close air of the Catholic Church. The book is weak, nay, often destructive to the cause he advocates; for he uses the argument of the moment without any regard to its ultimate tendencies. Dr. Doyle perceived this when he said, in praising the book, that "if St. Augustine were made less heretical, and Scratchenback (the German professor) less plausible, the work is one of which any of us might be proud." It is not always safe to prove your proposition by a reductio ad theologiam Germanicam. Moore was annoyed that he should be identified with his hero; while at the same time he says he does firmly believe all that he has said in his book of the superiority of the Roman Catholic religion over the Protestant in point of antiquity, authority, and consistency. That is, he thought the early Fathers more Catholic than Protestant. Perhaps he perceived that this point might be granted without any very fatal consequences to the common principles of Protestant churches. He was not in his book arguing out his own convictions; he was only striking a blow, with an Irishman's natural irritation, at the Established Church in Ireland. Whatever faith he thought himself bound to profess and defend, his real conclusions as to the relative advantages of the two churches are evident enough from several expressions he lets fall. We may cite, in particular, one memorandum which occurs in his diary of a conversation with his sister after their father's death: