filled with tisane; whilst upon a small table near the door are crowded together papers and perfume-bottles, inkstands and soiled gloves, a washhand basin and a candlestick, a hair-brush and two or three books,— the heterogeneous symbols of all the wretched inmate's wants, vanities and toil! The night had been a bad one, and the morning sun brought but small alleviation to Ferdinand's sufferings, whilst the malady itself held him prisoner in its clutches; the want of proper sustenance so weakened his frame that it could oppose no resistance to disease. The brain, without as yet precisely wandering, still from time to time created for itself fair illusions, gentle dreams. One form ever floated before Ferdinand's mental vision-far, far off, as in another sphere-and he would stretch forth his arms towards the image and, longing, cry to it for a look, a sign of recognition. A knock came at his door, uncertain, timid, loud;-why did they disturb him?-Another knock !-He groaned forth the word to enter, and a hand was laid upon the key. "Come in!" he again peevishly repeated. The door opened! To describe what passed in the minds of the two thus suddenly face to face to one another, is impossible. All the squalid, ugly, poverty, and apparent degradation we have tried to depict, flashed like lightning over Blanche de Vouvray's comprehension-she stood aghast, but the involuntary scream that escaped her was drowned in the violence of the exclamation, that burst from M. de Candolles' lips. With one hand drawing over him convulsively the blanket that was his only covering, and waving the other imperiously,-"Depart hence, depart ;" he shriek ed in bitter agony, and with eyes that started with horror from their sockets. The terror was mutual; and she who had come to console fled in dismay, and he, who would have paid with his heart's blood a touch of her hand, drove her from him as ruthlessly as though she had been his deadliest foe! Ferdinand de Candolles did not die then; he went raving mad, was confined at Charenton for many years, grew to be a harmless maniac, and died in the year 1848. Blanche de Vouvray is still a reigning beauty in the salons of Paris, universally respected, and only known by a very few as the heroine of this sad tale. THOMAS MOORE. It is an unpoetical and money-grubbing-age-poets live in it unheard, and unstriving to be heard-and die out of it unnoticed, without leaving a void, or exciting a regret. Thomas Moore has just expired, at a little village in Wilts. Three mourners, names unknown, followed his remains to the grave. Ireland, that for half a century has been enraptured in his songs, and whose best claims to being considered a nation are to be gathered from his verse, Ireland has said nothing. In Dublin, the birth-place of Moore, no sound of public sentiment is heard, save the airs which the "brass-band" of its orators are giving themselves. Deafened by the vulgarest bray of vulgar politicians, the Irish have not a tribute for their national bard, who rendered their country's politics what they never were before, and never will be again, something elevated, intelligent, and ennobling. Ireland, indeed, may retort, that for many years, Moore had turned his last look upon her and upon her politics, and that he lived and died a Whig; a kind of party which pursues a middle line, and which, consequently, is unpopular and abhorred in a country of extremes, like Ireland. Moreover, if England be unpoetical and money-grubbing, the genius of Ireland is without an idea in its head, or sixpence in its pocket. Of all those fair dreams and hopes, with which Moore peopled his Irish Olympus, not one survives. Patriotism, in that country, is represented by Mr. Birch, and heroism by Mr. Smith O'Brien. Even rebellion, put to the proof, has turned out to be a humbug; and though Moore's poetry once showed a mirror up to Irish nature, the nature is changed; and it is no longer for the poet to shed the light of Muse upon it, but for the statistician to chronicle its details by the light of his own little farthing candle. A "Union " is, in fact, Ireland's Temple of the Muses, a Sydney Godolphin Osborne, not Moore, its laureate. His prose beats poesy hollow, as do his facts far distance even Irish imagination. We cannot say, that we much admire the politics of poets, and much might be said against Moore's, Byron's, Southey's, and even Scott's. But that their susceptible minds should be impressed by that, which made necessarily so large a part of the mental atmosphere and social commerce in which they lived, was inevitable. And we may attribute more to their chance position in life, than to either the natural bent of their minds or the colour of their judgments. Moore's birth, childhood, boyhood, youthhood, went through the most stirring and exciting period of Irish history. He first saw the light in May, 1780, when the Irish, even the better Irish, inspired by American example, were in regiments as volunteers, and claiming independence with arms in their hands. The son of a respectable grocer, living at the corner of Aungier Street, Moore had the excellent and classic education which was within reach of the Irish middle class, at least in the metropolis; and he made the most of it, showing himself a most precocious youth, fond of spouting, reciting, acting, and, singing, and whilst yet a pigmy boy, even composing songs, which the risen generation could not equal. His precocious qualities and early claims to arrive at celebrity and excellence, made young Moore an acquaintaince and favourite of even the highest classes of Dublinians. Lord Moira noticed him, and that was sufficient to induce Moore's parents to fit him out for the London Temple, and destine him for the bar. These low browed gates, which stand cotemporary neighbours of Temple-bar, and which lead down to the hall and crypt, and cellar of legal study and research, were, to the young Irishman of that day, the gates to the Temple of Fame. It mattered little how the goddess was to be worshipped or won, by pleading or by poesy. Young Moore might have heard tell of the law, and its honours, but he had already become a secret votary of the Muse, and had never heen delivered of a couplet without the satisfaction of soon seeing it in print. He had cultivated two fields, the classics and conviviality, both favourites of the Irish mind. A translation of Anacreon naturally presented itself to both tastes. The idea not only pleased Moore, but the men of rank, who regarded his precocious talents with favour. Lord Moira spoke of the work to the Prince of Wales, to whom it was first dedicated in the year 1800. If a Greek Anacreon pleased, why not an English one? The tone of English writing was Epicurean. The Court was the great cynosure, to which all looked, and there was enshrined a gay, voluptuous Prince, to whose vices, when young, the English public were indulgent, however merciless and inveterate to the same qualities in a sovereign when old. Women and wine were the natural subject of a poet's idolatry in 1800, however at present a bard might eschew the theme. The Prince drank, the Prime Minister was nightly drunk, the Bar drank, some of the bishops were funny fellows. Nothing so natural as Little's poems in the London atmosphere of that time, although a voice from more moral Edinburgh was afterwards heard to chide the wanton muse. Such poetry, at such a convivial time, at least answered the grand purpose of procuring patronage; and the Prince, provided for Moore some fiscal place, under the name of Registrar, at the Bermudas. All the world now exclaims against the preposterous idea of sending a poet to keep accounts in the Bermudas, as of exposing him, if he did not remain there, to the faithlessness of the agent whom he might select. But the Prince was not yet all-powerful. Sinecures were not to be obtained for poets from such a minister as Addington, and the Registrarship was thought a nice thing; though, like princes' favours in general, it was but a trap for the loss of peace and independence. The appointment sent Moore to travel, bore him away from that wide held of dissipation-though too narrow a one for a poet's imagination -London, opened the great book of Nature to him, and gave his fancy what it then altogether wanted, and what it never was very rich in, the local and the palpable, in the airy sphere of his poetic limnings. How beautiful are some of his first impressions at the Bermudas struck into hasty verse? Being so far across the Atlantic he continued his voyage, and visited Canada and the United States. The best known fruit of his excursion is the "Canadian Boat Song," of which he caught the music as well as conned the rhyme on the waters of the St. Laurence. The names to which Moore addressed verses in poetic epistles during the course of his wanderings, mark the friends whom he most prized. They are chiefly to Lord Strangford, to members of Lord Granard's family, to those of Lord Moira afterwards Marquis of Hastings; and he continually compared the scenes at Donnington, the seat of the latter, with those on the American lakes. "Where the blue bells of old Toronto shed, Their evening shadows o'er Ontario's bed." The moral impression made upon Moore by America is not that which we would have expected from one, in whose breast the seeds of Irish, that is, of extreme liberalism, were sleeping, if not germinating. The Americans are, indeed, as much annoyed at Moore's judgment of them in verse as they are of Dickens's opinions of them at a later day. His sentiments upon the Americans as a people are expressed in a poetical epistle from Washington, addressed to Lord Forbes. The poet complains that all the foul philosophy of France has overspread America, "Blighting the bloom of every social grace, And all those courtesies that love to shoot Round Virtue's stem-the flowerets of her fruit." If people had but the errors of youth, exclaims the poet"But no, 'tis heartless speculation's ill, All youth's trangressions with old age's chill; The apathy of wrong, the bosom's ice, A slow and cold stagnation unto vice.” He then accuses the American of loving money, as if industry were a vice, and stigmatizes— The factious race, Who, poor of heart, and prodigal of words, The Americans may forgive this juvenile effusion of the London man of fashion, spurning the horny hand and the coarse speech of the backwoodsman, a hand that Moore would have grasped a few years later, when he had come to form a due estimate of London fashions, princely friends, and the refinement of Tory rule. The critic Jeffrey, who came out in June, 1806, with one of his Thug articles upon poor Moore, never said a word on this precipitate judgment of the Americans. But the poet, being patronized by the Prince and Lord Moira, was too tempting a subject for critical anatomy. And accordingly his erotic couplets were held out to public anathema as likely to corrupt the women of the empire, although the poet was represented as having no other claim to attention but the amorous nature of the subject. As Jeffrey never handled or tried to appreciate a writer of genius and immortality, in his first essays, without branding him as a stupid fool, and as he every year sought to puff some stupid fool of his acquaintance or his party into eminence, we may leave Jeffrey as the Thersites of criticism to the award of posterity. Moore, however, was not for abiding this tardy judgment. He challenged Jeffrey. They met at Chalk Farm, and because the two purblind men of letters did not slaughter each other, the malignant world said the pistols had no balls; and Lord Byron was ungenerous enough to copy the calumny. The Edinburgh reviewer, however, may boast of having cured Moore of any further indulgence in the purely erotic vein. He began the series of the Irish melodies in the following year, 1807. But the poet, as indeed was but natural to his more manly age, mingled a purer spirit with his nectar. Never was task better adapted to genius than the Irish melodies to Moore. The current of his mind was music, and his thoughts ran to that current. His ear was as delicate and as well tuned as his fancy was inexhaustible. He had been familiar from boyhood not only with Irish airs, but with that peculiar beauty which the union of power and pathos in the native voice and mind can give them; their rudeness required some refinement to suit them to a less prejudiced ear, and the Irish music required an introducer like Moore to render it at once the denizen of the English drawing-room and the companion of the English piano. This Moore did with little sacrifice of originality or raciness, and with the addition of the "words that burn." Whilst considering the great success of the melodies even as music, it should not be forgotten at how low an ebb was music in those days, although the town was full of glee-clubs and Anacreontic societies. Dibdin and Incledon were the heroes of song; but the style of the music was so poor, that without their jollity and lungs, it would scarcely have excited a cheer even at Vauxhall. Rossini had then scarcely appeared above the horizon, and the opera was limited to its simple old masters. In short, a happy and original air was as rare in music as anything that might be called poetry during the laureateship of Pye. The muses of song and verse were, however, rising together. Scott was publishing his "Lay of the Last Minstrel," and Southey his "Thalaba." The poems and operas which soon burst upon the world were already in preparation; Moore heralding them with the first number of the "Irish Melodies." If Moore did much for Irish song, the task had no little and no unhappy influence upon him; it awakened in his breast feelings that had long lain dormant, or been compressed as not harmonizing with the ideas of that English society in which he lived. The effect of that society upon his taste and political feelings has been seen in his judgment respecting America, when Ireland remained, if not a forbidden, at least an untouched subject with Moore for many years. When the Prince Regent discarded all the professions of his past life, and openly avowed his preference not only of governing Ireland with Tory politics rather than Whig, but his desire and determination to keep the Irish Roman Catholics still bound down beneath an oppressive yoke, the liberals of all ranks exhaled their bile against the Regent. Moore felt his natural feeling again set free; his melodies offered a natural sentiment as well as vent to it, and a deep and passionate denunciation of English oppression, came to be blended by him alternately with the song of amorous sentiment or bacchanalian gaiety. In his second number the poet accuses himself for making love, when he ought to have been sounding the trumpet of rebellion. Still all these, which would have been too serious, and would have been found so even by liberals a year after the events of 1798, were now tolerated, and passed as a very legitimate and warrantable species of opposition, at least for a poet. Love and rebellion form the staple of the Irish Melodies; both, too, if the verses are to be taken literally, au pied de la lettre, as the French say, are neither warrantable love, nor rational insurrection. The excuse is, that in neither is the poet serious. There reigns a half earnestness, half jocoseness throughout, sufficient, we should think, to assure the loyalist and the puritan, that no great affront was intended to either of their susceptibilities. The sword of the rebel is too thickly wreathed with roses to be formidable, and the warmth of love's passion is meant merely to figure and express those evanescent moments and trains of thought that faint as soon as they are born. There is evident insincerity in the immorality |