the Continent,—one in company with the poet Rogers, and a second with his friend, Lord John Russell. After a stay in Paris, where about 1822, he wrote the Loves of the Angels^ and Fables of the Holy Alliance^ he finally returned to England. Shortly after this, he took up his abode at that charming cottage for all time indissolubly associated with his name, to the quiet and happiness of which—as he so tenderly apostrophizes it,—
"That dear home, that saving ark,
Where love's true light at last I've found—
Cheering within, when all grows dark,
And comfortless and stormy round"—
he could ever return with joy, after his occasional visits to London, the tumult and strife of the outward world, and the intoxicating adulation of society. This was Sloperton, in the immediate neighbourhood of the lovely demesne of Bowood, the seat of his friend, the Marquis of Lansdowne. Here, the charm and delight of society, he passed the latter part of his life. Bowood, with its fine library, its lovely scenery and its refined hospitality, was ever open to the poet,—and thus, as they sail down the stream of time, the name of Lansdowne will be for ever associated with that of Moore, as Mecænas is with Horace, Southampton with Shakespeare, Glencairn with Burns, and Lucien Buonaparte with Béranger.
On the thirty-seventh anniversary of the "Literary Fund," a speech was delivered by Moore, a passage in which has a deep and interesting significance, when we think of the calamity with which he was subsequently visited. "Men of genius," he says, "like the precious perfumes of the East, are exceedingly liable to exhaustion; and the period often comes when nothing of it remains but its sensibility, and the life which long gave light to the world terminates by becoming a burden to itself, … and the person who now addresses you speaks the more feelingly, because he cannot be sure that the fate he has been depicting may not one day be his own."
These boding words were, unhappily, prophetical of his own fate. As in the case of another great genius of his country,—Swift—the light of reason was extinguished, and darkness enshrouded the intellect that had so long and brightly shone with the fires of wit and imagination. Thenceforth his existence was purely physical, and after a few years of decrepitude, he sank into the grave on Feb. 25, 1852, in the seventy-third year of his age. His wife survived him, but all his four children had died before their father. He was buried in the graveyard attached to Bromham Church, Wiltshire, where, twenty-five years later, a memorial window in his honour was unveiled by the late Mrs. S. C. Hall.
One word as to his domestic relations. He married in 1811, and has been absurdly charged by the moralists with selfish neglect of his amiable wife. This allegation, supported by extracts from his own Diary, may be best refuted by the statement of one who was surely well able to speak:—"This excellent and beautiful person received from him the homage of a lover, enhanced by all the gratitude, all the confidence, which the daily and hourly happiness he enjoyed were sure to inspire; thus, whatever amusement he might find in society, whatever sights he might behold, whatever literary resources he might seek elsewhere, he always returned to his home with a fresh feeling of delight. The time he had been absent
