Part 38

For want of poets and poets' children entertaining these rational ideas, what miseries have from age to age awaited them! In the course of my peregrinations to the birthplaces and the tombs of poets, how often have these reflections been forced upon me. Humble, indeed, are frequently their birthplaces; but what is far worse, how wretched are often the places of their deaths! How many of them have died in the squalid haunts of destitution, and even by their own hand. How many of them have left their families to utter poverty; how many of those caressed in their lives, lie without a stone or a word of remembrance in their graves! Scott, with all his glory and his monuments in other places, has not even a slab bearing his name laid upon his breast. Chatterton's very bones have been dispersed to make a market. Motherwell, amid all the proud cenotaphs in the Necropolis at Glasgow, such men as Major Monteith having whole funeral palaces to themselves, has not even a cubic foot of stone, or a mere post with his initials, to mark his resting-place. But still more melancholy is the contemplation of the beginning and the end of Robert Tannahill, the popular song-writer of Paisley. Tannahill was no doubt stimulated by the fame of Burns. True, he had not the genius of Burns, but genius he had, and that is conspicuous in many of those songs which during his lifetime were sung with enthusiasm by his countrymen. Tannahill was a poor weaver at Paisley. The cottage where he lived is still to be seen, a very ordinary weaver's cottage in an ordinary street; and the place where he drowned himself may be seen too at the outside of the town. This is one of the most dismal places in which a poet ever terminated his career. Tannahill, like Burns, was fond of a jovial hour amid his comrades in a public-house. But weaving of verse and weaving of calico did not agree. The world applauded, but did not patronize; poverty came like an armed man; and Tannahill in the frenzy of despair resolved to terminate his existence. Outside of Paisley there is a place where a small stream passes under a canal. To facilitate this passage, a deep pit is sunk, and a channel for the waters is made under the bottom of the canal. This pit is, I believe, eighteen feet deep. It is built round with stone, which is rounded off at its mouth, so that any one falling in can not by any possibility get out, for there is nothing to lay hold of. Any one once in there might grasp and grasp in vain for an edge to seize upon. He would sink back and back till he was exhausted and sunk forever. No doubt Tannahill in moments of gloomy observation had noted this. And at midnight he came, stripped off his coat, laid down his hat, and took the fatal plunge. No cry could reach human ear from that horrible abyss; no effort of the strongest swimmer could avail to sustain him: soon worn out he must go down, and amid the black, boiling torrent be borne through the subterranean channel onward with the stream. Thus died Robert Tannahill, and a more fearful termination was never put to a poetical career. This place is called Tannahill's hole, and cats and dogs drowned in it, from its peculiar fitness for inevitable drowning, float about on the surface, and add to the revolting shudder which the sight of it creates.

Such are some of the dominant tendencies of poetic fate which made Wordsworth exclaim,

"We poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof come in the end despondency and madness;"

and such must there be till genius respect itself, and cause the public to respect it; till it reflect that it is a heavenly endowment, and not a trade stock.

Among the more fortunate men of genius,--among those who by strength of pinion, and by various resources of prose, poetry, and music, have soared above the poet's ordinary path, beset with ropes, poison, throat-cutting, razors, pistols, and drowning holes,--is the gay and genial Thomas Moore. Moore was born, as I have said, in Dublin. His father kept a shop in Aungier-street, and was a respectable grocer and spirit dealer. The shop continues exactly as it was to the present day, is employed for the same trade, and over it is the little drawing-room in which Mr. Moore himself tells us, that he used to compose his songs, and with his sister and some young friends, act plays as a boy.

He was first educated by Mr. Samuel Whyte, to whom in his fourteenth year he addressed a sonnet, which was published in a Dublin magazine, called the Anthologia. This Mr. Whyte was fond of dramatic representation, and is mentioned by Moore as having superintended private theatricals at different gentlemen's and noblemen's houses, as at the Duke of Leinster's, at Marly, the seat of the Latouches, etc., where he supplied prologues. Sheridan had been a pupil of Whyte's, and it is further stated by Mr. Moore, that many parents were alarmed at the danger of his instilling a love for these things into his scholars. Can there be a doubt that he did so with Sheridan and Moore?

He was sent to the university in Dublin, where the unfortunate Robert Emmet was at the time. Moore soon formed an acquaintance with him, and became a member of a debating society, at which Emmet and other young patriots assembled to prepare themselves for public life. On the approach of the frightful explosion of 1798, the university was visited by Lord Clare, its vice-chancellor, with a rigorous examination, government having become aware of the students being deeply engaged in the organization of the Irish union. Among those found to be thus implicated, were Emmet, John Brown, and others. They became marked men. Moore himself underwent examination, but came clear off. From these connections and early impressions, however, we may date his steady adherence to liberal and patriotic sentiments.

At the university his poetic genius early displaying itself, he soon found his way over to England, where his wit, his songs, and his conversational brilliancy, introduced him to the first circles of fashionable life, and to government patronage. He was appointed to the situation of Registrar to the Admiralty Court at the Bermudas. This appointment turned out unfortunately for him, but it enabled him to extend his knowledge of the world. He published on his return a collection of odes, epistles, and fugitive poems, illustrative of the scenery and life of that island; and he made a tour in the United States, from which he indited a series of most caustic and satirical epistles. From the hour that he settled down again in England, notwithstanding the time which he must have devoted to society, into which his peculiar powers of pleasing have continually drawn him, he has displayed an extraordinary industry. The catalogue of his writings from first to last is enormous. The Odes of Anacreon translated. A Candid Appeal to Public Confidence, or Considerations on the dangers of the Present Crisis, 1803. Corruption and Intolerance, two poems. Epistles, Odes, and other Poems, 1806. Little's Poems, 1808. A Letter to the Roman Catholics of Dublin, 1810. M.P., or the Blue Stocking; a comic opera, in three acts, performed at the Lyceum, 1811. Intercepted Letters, or the Twopenny Post Bag, by Thomas Browne the younger, 1812: this has gone through upward of fourteen editions. Irish Melodies. Arthur Murphy's Translation of Sallust completed. The Skeptic, a philosophical Satire. Lalla Rookh, 1817. The Fudge Family in Paris, 1818. Ballads, Songs, etc. Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, in verse. Trifles Reprinted, in verse. Loves of the Angels. Rhymes on the Road. Miscellaneous Poems by Members of the Procurante Society. Fables for the Holy Alliance. Ballads, Songs, Miscellaneous Poems, etc. Memoirs of Captain Rock. Life of Sheridan. The Epicurean. Odes on Cash, Corn, Catholics, etc. Evenings in Greece. Life and Letters of Lord Byron, in 17 vols. History of Ireland, etc., etc., etc.

If Mr. Moore has been a gay man, it can not be said that he has been an indolent one. He was born in May, 1780, and is, consequently, now only sixty-six. It would appear that, on coming to England, he destined himself for the bar, as he entered himself of the Middle Temple, in 1799. But instead of legal studies, poetical ones seem to have occupied him in his chambers; for in the course of 1800, and before he had completed his twentieth year, he published his translation of the Odes of Anacreon. This seems to have decided his fate for literature. In 1801 out came Little's Poems, many of which, I am persuaded, the author would give a great portion of his fame to be able to cancel forever; and, indeed, in his late edition, in one volume, I am glad to see that the most exceptionable are excluded. In 1803 he set sail to take possession of his office in the West Indies; on which occasion he was absent something more than a year. To pursue a rapid outline of his life;--on his return to England he married a Miss Dyke, said to be a lady of great personal beauty, most amiable disposition, and accomplished manners. I believe she has always shown herself a woman of much energy of character and tact of judgment, and that the poet has found great cause to rely on her opinion in matters of daily life. His great poem, Lalla Rookh, appeared in 1817; and in the summer of that year Moore visited Paris, where he collected the materials for that humorous production, The Fudge Family in Paris. In the following year he made a visit to Ireland, where he was received with the highest enthusiasm and public honor. In 1822 he again visited Paris, where great respect was shown him by the French literati, and a public dinner was given to him by the English nobility and gentry resident there. In one of his prefaces to his different volumes, which, in fact, contain his literary life, we learn, that he was compelled to live in France at this time, in consequence of the responsibilities under which he had fallen from the conduct of his deputy in the Bermudas. He was, indeed, liable to demands of at least six thousand pounds, and it was not safe for him to remain in England till this matter was arranged; which was at length done by his friends, and the sum reduced to one thousand; of which the deputy's uncle paid three hundred. Two summers Moore states himself and family to have lived in a cottage of some Spanish friends, near their seat. La Butte Coaslin. He says that it conjured up an apparition of Sloperton, which by a happy quotation from Pope he defines--

"A little cot with trees a row. And, like his master, very low."

Here he used to wander in the noble park of St. Cloud, with his pocket-book and pencil, composing verses, and pondering on the Epicurean; and closing the evening by practicing duets with the lady of his Spanish friend, or listening to her guitar. King, the dramatic writer, lived near them, and Washington Irving visited him there. In 1823 he published The Loves of the Angels; and since then, beside the Life of Sheridan, and various other productions, the Life and Letters of Lord Byron.

Perhaps the most important event connected with his later life was the destruction of the Memoirs of Lord Byron, which had been intrusted to him for publication after his death. These Memoirs had been given to Mr. Moore, and Mr. Moore had sold the copyright of them to Mr. Murray, for two thousand guineas. Lord Byron being dead, and the time for publication come, the relatives of Lord Byron took alarm, and implored Mr. Moore to allow them to be destroyed. To this Mr. Moore was weak enough to consent. That he did so from a sense of the most delicate honor, there could be no question; even had he not proved that by the sacrifice of two thousand guineas and interest, which he repaid to Mr. Murray, though he had to borrow it of Messrs. Longman. But if honor to Lord Byron's relatives was preserved, it was neither so to Lord Byron nor the public. It was a sacred trust of the one for the gratification of the other, and had Mr. Moore had any scruples on the subject of publication, he should have returned the MS. to Lord Byron while living. When dead, there was no such way out; there was no alternative, without a betrayal of the most sacred trust that could be reposed in man, but to allow the noble donor's intention to be faithfully carried out. There has been much controversy on this topic, but this still continues, and will continue to be, the result of public opinion.

One of the secrets of Mr. Moore's successful industry, perhaps, may be found in the fact of his having, spite of his social disposition, and of all the fascinations of society for a man of his fame, wit, and accomplishments, lived the greater part of his life since his marriage in the country. Among the various places of his abode, two only have been residences of much duration. These are Mayfield cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, and Sloperton cottage, near Devizes, in Wiltshire.

At Mayfield he lived several years, and here he wrote Lalla Rookh. This village is not particularly picturesque, nor is the immediate neighborhood striking; but it lies in a fine country, and within a short distance of it are Dovedale, and other beautiful scenes in Derbyshire and Staffordshire. The recommendations of Mayfield have been thus enumerated by a cotemporary writer in a periodical. "Moore's cottage is in a secluded part of Mayfield, a village on the Staffordshire side of the river Dove, about two miles from Ashbourne. It is a spot not often alluded to in literature, though the neighborhood has been peculiarly honored by literary men. Three miles from Mayfield is Wootton-hall, where Rousseau lived several years; where he botanized, and where he wrote his Confessions. One mile from Mayfield, on the other side of the Dove, lived a great, and perhaps, a much better man than Rousseau, but who will not attain an equal renown--Michael Thomas Sadler. At Oakover, one mile from Mayfield, is the residence of the late Mr. Ward, author of Tremaine. Two miles farther up the river, in the loveliest of all villages, a grotto is still preserved in which Congreve wrote his first drama. A ten minutes' walk affords a view of the grand entrance to Dovedale, immortalized by old Izaak Walton. At Tissington, another most exquisite village, like the former without work-house or ale-house, lived Greaves, the author of the Spiritual Quixote. Dr. Taylor, one of Dr. Johnson's most esteemed friends, was an inhabitant of Ashbourne. The great lexicographer was a visitor of this neighborhood, and some of his most amusing conversations and peculiarities are recorded by Boswell while staying in this quiet town. Mayfield cottage bears now some claim to the notice of the lovers of literature, from its being the residence of Mr. Alfred Butler, the clever author of the novels of Elphinstone and The Herberts."

It was not, however, the attractions enumerated in the above passage which determined the settlement of Moore there. His wife and himself were traveling along from a scene of great aristocratic splendor, of which they had become so weary, that they sighed for the utmost simplicity, retirement, and repose, and vowed that they would take the very first place of such a character that they found vacant. Mayfield cottage was the one. "It was a poor place," said Moore to myself, "little better than a barn, but we at once took it, and set about making it habitable."

It is no doubt from some such remark on the part of the poet that a paragraph originated which I have lately seen going the round of the newspapers, that he wrote Lalla Rookh in a barn. That barn was, in fact, Mayfield cottage. The right-hand front window is pointed out as belonging to Moore's little parlor; the window at the side belonged to his not very extensive library, and the trees visible above the roof are part of the orchard, his favorite study, in which some of his choicest lyrics were composed.

The warm-hearted poet, though it is many years since he quitted Mayfield, speaks with pleasure of the enjoyment he experienced there. The country around, both in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, has many charms for a poetic eye. There are, too, many persons of taste and intelligence living in it, from whom he and his family received every cordial attention. He was zealously engaged in working out what he deemed was to be the crowning work of his fame, Lalla Rookh, and he regarded the cottage at Mayfield, and the scene immediately surrounding it, peculiarly favorable for this purpose. "It was indeed," he observes, in the preface to his eighth volume, "to the secluded life I led during the years 1813-1816, in a lone cottage in the fields of Derbyshire, that I owed the inspiration, whatever may have been its value, of some of the best and most popular portions of Lalla Rookh. It was amid the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters that I found myself enabled, by that concentration of thought which retirement alone gives, to call up around me some of the sunniest of those Eastern scenes which have since been welcomed in India itself as almost native to its clime." It is, he says, a peculiarity of his imagination that it is easily broken in upon and diverted by striking external objects. "I am," said he to me, "at once very imaginative, and very matter-of-fact. The matter-of-fact can at any moment put to flight all the operations of the imagination. It was, therefore, necessary for me to exclude matter-of-fact, and all very striking or attractive objects, and to concenter all my imagination on the objects I wished to portray. My story lay in the East, and I must imbue and saturate my imagination entirely with Eastern ideas, and Eastern imagery. I must create, and place, and keep before me a peculiar world, with all its people and characteristics. No place could be more favorable for this than Mayfield, because it had nothing prominent or seducing enough to rush through and force itself into the world which I had evoked, created, and was walking and working in. The result was most complete. Never having been into the East myself, yet every one who _has_ been there declares that nothing can be more perfect than my representations of it, its people, and life, in Lalla Rookh."

But though living in the country, Moore was always in the pretty regular habit of visiting town during the season. Here he was the charm of the circles of the Whig nobility, especially at Lansdowne and Holland houses. At these places, and especially the latter, he met all the distinguished men of the time. Byron, Jeffrey, Sidney Smith, Campbell, Brougham, and the like. Even in the country he has lived much at times in the houses of his great friends. In particular he records his visit at Chatsworth, and at Donnington-park, the seat of Lord Moira, where he describes himself as passing whole weeks in the library there, even when the family was absent, "indulging in all the freest airy castle-building of authorship." Here he met, oddly enough, with the rival princes of France, poor Charles X. and his brother, the Duc de Montpensier, and the Comte Beaujolais, at the same time with the Duke of Orleans, the present Louis Philippe, who in the library at the same house would be deep in a volume of Clarendon, "unconsciously preparing himself by such studies for the high and arduous destiny which not only the good genius of France, but his own sagacious and intrepid spirit had early marked out for him." Rogers and Moore have been for many years very intimate friends, and of course Moore has for years been much at home in the classic abode of the latter poet. During Byron's residence in Italy, Moore visited him there, and received the unlucky gift of the Memoirs, out of which, and his two thousand guineas, he was so shamefully wheedled by those who could so very well afford to pay the price of that burnt offering, to him a serious sacrifice.

But Lord Lansdowne was anxious to get the wit and poet down into his own neighborhood, and pressed him to come and live near Bowood. "Tommy, who dearly loves a lord," was the designation given to Moore by his _dear_ friend, LORD Byron. As he obliged the relatives of Byron by burning the horror-creating Memoirs, so he was willing to oblige Lord Lansdowne by living near him. His lordship sent him word that there was a house just the thing for him, at Bromham, not far from Bowood. Moore went to it, but found it far too large and expensive for a poet's income. He, however, told Mrs. Moore on his return that he had seen a cottage on the road that was every thing that _he_ desired, with a most delicious garden, and in a sweet situation. With her usual energy, Mrs. Moore at once took coach, hastened to the cottage, liked it as well as her husband did, and took it at once. This was Sloperton cottage, and here they have resided nearly thirty years.

It is Sloperton cottage which hereafter will be regarded with the chief interest as the residence of the poet. It stands in the midst of a delightful country, and though itself buried, as it were, in an ordinary thickly wooded lane, branching off to the left from the high-road, about two miles from Devizes, on the way to Chippenham, yet from its upper windows, as well as from its garden, enjoys peeps through the trees into lovely scenes. Down southward from the far end of the house opens the broad and noble vale toward Trowbridge; in front to the right, across a little valley, stands on a fine mount, amid nobly grown trees, the village of Bromham, with a gentleman's house standing, boldly backed and flanked by the masses of wood, and the church spire peering above it. More to the left, in front, you look across some miles of country, and see the historical foreland of Roundaway hill, the termination of the chalk-hills of the White-house-vale, proudly overlooking Devizes. This hill, my driver gravely assured me, was Roundaway hill, _where King John signed the charter_! Behind the cottage, across some rich fields, are the wooded slopes of Spy-park, once the property of Sir Andrew Baynton.

At a few hundred yards' distance, on the left-hand side of the lane as you advance from the Devizes road, there stands the old manor-house of Nonsuch, which has gone through many hands, and has, I believe, lately been sold, and is now refitting for a modern mansion. A narrow foot-lane descends past its grounds down through the valley, between tall hedges and embowering alders, to the village of Bromham, which gives you a view of the ancient knolls of the parklike environs of Nonsuch. Old sturdy oaks are standing here and there on these knolls, and every thing presents an air of great antiquity. A footpath runs through these grounds, by which you are admitted to loiter at your leisure amid the retired slopes and woodland hollows of this old English scenery. The footway which, I have said, leads also down past it, to Bromham, is peculiarly rural. It is paved, as the bottom abounds in water, where a beautiful spring gushes up from the foot of the ascent toward the village; and in passing along it, you feel yourself to be shrouded amid a luxuriant growth of water-loving trees, and surrounded by the quietness of woodland banks, and rustic farm lands. The village is purely agricultural, and has a fine church, with a singularly richly ornamented battlement.

Such is the immediate situation of Moore's cottage. Views of it every one has seen; but it is only when you stand actually before it, see it covered with clematis, its two porches hung with roses, and the lawn and garden which surround it kept in the most exquisite order, and fragrant with every flower of the season, that you are fully sensible of what a genuine poet's nest it is.