Edinburgh Review, No. ccxi., p. 73. Another little volume, with a biographical preface, is entitled Recollections of Samuel Rogers (Longmans, 1859, small 8vo). The editor of this was William Sharp, a nephew of the poet, one of whose brothers, Samuel Sharp, is author of a privately printed memoir, Some Particulars of the Life of Samuel Rogers (1859, 8vo, pp. lxiv.
V.— THOMAS MOORE.
As we look upon the figure opposite, in a bower of vines and roses, and with the head of Anacreon above his own as if to remind us that he is below the bard of Teos, we need to be reminded, as Maginn hints, that in "that little wizened, cunning, crabbed countenance, which is not much better than a caricature of a John-apple of ancient date," we are looking upon "the Epicurean in person— the Thomas Little,—the 'kissing and kissed' of Rosa—the mail-coach companion of 'Fanny of Timmol,'—the poet of all the loves, and all the grapes"!
"What a lucky fellow you are," said Rogers to Moore; "surely you must have been born with a rose on your lips, and a nightingale singing on the top of your bed!" And yet the "Bard of the Butterflies" certainly does not look happy in his Anacreontic retreat; perhaps he is brooding over the Regent's threat to "put him into a wine-cooler;" or haply has Maclise thought appropriate that "expression of hostility to the Church establishment," which Sydney Smith once advised a sculptor to throw into the poet's countenance.
But to descend to facts. Thomas Moore was born May 28, 1779, in Dublin, where his father was a tradesman, respectable, but of the humbler sort. "Tommy dearly loves a Lord," was Byron's memorable saying of his little friend; and remembering this amiable weakness, one cannot but think with amusement of the painful distress of the poet, when, on his introduction in long after-life to Jamie Hogg, in a brilliant assemblage of wit and fashion, the simple Shepherd made crude allusion to his lowly origin, in the words, "You and me maun be freends, Maister Moore, for we're baith leerie pauets, and baith sprung frae the dregs of the people!" He received his earlier education under the care of the well-known Samuel Whyte, of Grafton Street, who will be remembered alike by his own literary productions, and as the early tutor of Sheridan. At the age of fourteen, he became a student of Trinity College, Dublin, when, inter alia, he gained the medal of the Historical Society for a poetical extravaganza entitled "An Ode upon Nothing, with Notes by Trismagistus Rustifustius"; and in 1799, choosing the law as a profession, he proceeded to London to enter at the Middle Temple, with a "little packet of guineas," as a viaticum, and a scapular blessed by the priest as a charm against evil, sewed up by his careful mother in the waistband of his pantaloons. As the classical studies of Lockhart produced that direction of thought to which we owe Valerius, so it is to the college life of Moore that we are indebted for the first fruits of his genius, the translation of Anacreon. This had a considerable success. So long as youth, and beauty, and
