



Produced by Andrea Ball and Marc D'Hooghe at
http://www.freeliterature.org





THOMAS MOORE

By

STEPHEN GWYNN


ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS


LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.

1905




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I--Boyhood and Early Poems

CHAPTER II--Early Manhood and Marriage

CHAPTER III--"Lalla Rookh"

CHAPTER IV--Period of Residence Abroad

CHAPTER V--Work as Biographer and Controversialist

CHAPTER VI--The Decline of Life

CHAPTER VII--General Appreciation

APPENDIX

INDEX




THOMAS MOORE




CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD AND EARLY POEMS


Sudden fame, acquired with little difficulty, suffers generally a period
of obscuration after the compelling power which attaches to a man's
living personality has been removed; and from this darkness it does not
always emerge. Of such splendour and subsequent eclipse, Moore's fate
might be cited as the capital example.

The son of a petty Dublin tradesman, he found himself, almost from his
first entry on the world, courted by a brilliant society; each year
added to his friendships among the men who stood highest in literature
and statesmanship; and his reputation on the Continent was surpassed
only by that of Scott and Byron. He did not live to see a reaction. Lord
John Russell could write boldly in 1853, a year after his friend's
death, that "of English lyrical poets, Moore is surely the greatest."
There is perhaps no need to criticise either this attitude of excessive
admiration, or that which in many cases has replaced it, of tolerant
contempt. But it is as well to emphasise at the outset the fact that
even to-day, more than a century after he began to publish,