A Visit from St. Nicholas
It will be remembered that it is admitted that the poem was taken from Dr. Moore's house to Troy by Miss Butler; that she might have supposed him to be the author without any specific claim on his part; and that it was probably she who gave his name to Editor Holley; consequently that the first connection of his name with the poem might have been wholly without his connivance. It is argued by Dr. Thomas that in the end Dr. Moore very possibly came to believe he really wrote it. "Having at last permitted his name to become connected with the poem, perhaps after denials which became successively fainter, before actual acquiescence took their place, it was possibly natural to find detailed evidence in support of a claim which at last may well have been really sincere. It is not difficult to believe that Dr. Moore actually came to think, as time went on, that the poem was really his own." That his claim was not at once disputed was due, it is alleged, to an entirely natural reluctance on the part of the Livingstons to call into question the veracity of the son of a Bishop and a professor of Biblical Learning.
There is a certain plausibility about all this, though it should be pointed out that there is no single written document extant to show that Henry Livingston ever claimed the authorship of "A Visit from St. Nicholas," even after its
77
