night," so Moore declares, Reynolds was "after" him, always increasing the magnitude of his bribe. At last he forced a check for a hundred pounds into the poet's empty pocket (for all the world like a scene in Caran d'Ache's "Histoire d'un Chèque"), imploring in return a hundred lines of verse. But Moore's virtue—or his vanity—was impregnable. "The task was but light, and the money would have been convenient," he confesses; "but I forced it back on him again. The fact is, it is my name brings these offers, and my name would suffer by accepting them."
One might suppose that the baffled tempter would now have permanently withdrawn, save that the strength of tempters lies in their never knowing when they are beaten. Three years later, Heath renewed the attack, proposing that Moore should furnish all the letterpress, prose and verse, of the "Keepsake" for 1832, receiving in payment the generous sum of one thousand pounds. Strange to say, Moore took rather kindly to this appalling suggestion, admitted he liked it better than its predecessors, and consented to think the matter over
