of the elegances of fashionable life, but a heart that feels for the millions of its fellow-beings in want of the common necessaries of life! Not a set of brilliant frivolous accomplishments, but a manly strength of character, proof against the seductions of a throne! He, in short, is a patriot King, who without any other faculty usually possessed by Sovereigns, has one which they seldom possess,—the power in imagination of changing places with his people. Such a King may indeed aspire to the character of a ruling providence over a nation; any other is but the head-cypher of a court.
THE FUDGE FAMILY IN PARIS.
Edited by Thomas Brown, the younger, Author of the "Twopenny Post-bag"—Longmans.
April 25, 1818.
The spirit of poetry in Mr. Moore is not a lying spirit. "Set it down, my tables"—we have still, in the year 1818, three years after the date of Mr. Southey's laureateship, one poet, who is an honest man. We are glad of it: nor does it spoil our theory, for the exception proves the rule. Mr. Moore unites in himself two names that were sacred, till they were prostituted by our modern mountebanks, the Poet and the Patriot. He is neither a coxcomb nor a catspaw,—a whiffling turncoat, nor a thorough-paced tool, a mouthing sycophant, "a full solempne man," like Mr. Wordsworth,—a whining monk, like Mr. Southey,—a maudlin Methodistical lay-preacher, like Mr. Coleridge,—a merry Andrew, like the fellow that plays on the salt-box at Bartlemy Fair,—or the more pitiful jack-pudding, that makes a jest of humanity in St. Stephen's Chapel. Thank God, he is like none of these—he is not one of the Fudge Family. He is neither a bubble nor a cheat. He makes it his business neither to hoodwink his own understanding, nor to blind or gag others. He is a man of wit and fancy, but
