We do not pretend to give a notice of this book after the usual fashion. We shall comment on it, as it may happen; but our great object is to shew that the author is an insincere man of the world, and that neither he nor his hero have a right to scatter charges of vulgarity and unworthiness. Had Mr Moore’s second volume contained no more offence than the first, we should have passed it over, content to let him enjoy the airs he gives himself, and his harmless Irish metaphor of “venom on a grave.” Nor do we now pay attention to the work, out of any regard for his opinion, as far as he is concerned; but we have resolved, for certain weighty reasons, self-love apart, never to let another attack on us pass without notice. It is a plan we determined, on pursuing when we set up The Tatler and we have already found the benefit of it. Our wish, as we said before, is to attack nobody in person, but to lead quiet tattling lives, if we are allowed to do so; but if not, we shall do our best, and for more sakes than our own, to make the blow recoil on the assailant. We have suffered enough upon all points; we have conceded enough in the case of Lord Byron. We shall concede no more. Our business will now be to give specimens of the blows we have withheld. As to Mr Moore’s opinion of us or our writings the reader will see why we have long ceased to cure for it; and we will here briefly tell him the reason, before we give him the proofs. We shall not deny him justice; but justice will be amply sufficient for our purpose.

Mr Moore is a songster and a man of wit. He is nothing more, nor ever will be, should he try for it till he burst. To be a man of wit; however, and a genuine one, as we allow him to be, is much; and to be a wit and a genuine songster too, has contented the ambition of the French patriot, Beranger, who has got fame by it, and admiration, and love. But then Beranger has been prepared to suffer, and to go to prison nay, he has been even content (when time was) to wear a poor coat (mention it not in the Squares!); and he has laughed at intimacies with the great, and shown that he laughed sincerely. In one word, he has had faith in disinterestedness, and practised it. Now Mr Moore has no faith except in a joke, and a lord, and a good dinner; and yet he must needs try to win a serious reputation. For this purpose he has written volumes of bad prose, full of insincerity, and poems which are “three-piled hyperboles,” of sugar-plums. He is one of those who must

paint the lily And throw a perfume on the violet.

He paints and plasters, because he has no faith in his materials. He cannot give us the soul of what he describes; he despairs of being able to make us love it in its simplicity; so he brings a heap of gaudy colours and gilding to stick upon it, that we may partake of the benefits of his obtuseness. Even in his songs, he can rarely get beyond a stanza with any real gravity. His table-songs are inimitable: his lampoons have been the just dread of dowagers and Whig-rats, But with the exception of it few lyrics upon recollections connected with Ireland, and probably with the best part of his childhood, which are affecting and beautiful, he cannot get a good serious thought in the first verse of song, but he must spoil it in the next with some conceit or pedantry. He set about spoiling his prose, in the same manner, with classical names lugged in to bear company with modern, like a schoolboy’s theme, with degrading prettinesses, and remote, half-witted metaphors; such as when he talks of Burke “perching himself on the remotest branch from popular contact;” as if Burke, and the thick of politics, had anything to do with a linnet in a bush. The ridicule of the critics made him doubt this style; so in his new work he has done his best to alter it, though it was evidently a hard task; and not knowing how to be in earnest, he has taken to as ludicrous a formality; talks of “the poet Dryden” and “the poet Ariosto,” as if there were Drydens and Ariostos who were potters; and puts on so many strange, bridling, cosy, motherly, moral airs, betwixt love for his naughty young master, and zeal for the chaplain, that we almost fancy him with a mob-cap on, and a cup of “the creature” by his side. In short, Mr. Moore is no real biographer, no prose-writer, no thinker; there is not one original reflection in all his remarks, nor one that has not been made in a better manner before him by writers of his own time; and his poetry is just as good as wit and festivity can make it, and nothing else. His world is the little world of fashion; his notions of liberty those of a Whig-Aristocrat, without the excuse; and the whole secret of his deification of Lord Byron is, that their intercourse was one of flattery and convenience, and that in trumpeting his great craft down the stream, he hopes his “little sail”

Will join the triumph and partake the gale.

He is mistaken. His huge book will go down to posterity like many others, for anybody to dig out of the book-shelves who chooses; but it will assuredly be left there, with a great deal even of what Lord Byron has supplied, like the letters of Rochester and others, which nobody now cares about. Extracts will do very well for the collections of those days, but none of Mr Moore’s heavy common-places will accompany them; nor will Lord Byron, though a far greater genius than he, be regarded with anything like his biographer’s wholesale astonishment. Does he think that the mighty mind of posterity will busy itself with his bustling details, unless it be as we do with Mr Pepys; or look upon a lord with his little eyes? Even now, Lord Byron is not regarded by thousands, in any point of view, as he supposes, or would have us think he supposes. The bad opinion of the Noble Lard that was entertained years ago by multitudes, even among the aristocracy, is changed—for the worse. The grounds of this deterioration remain undisproved. The very lapse of a few short months has made a difference as to the impression which Mr Moore might have expected from his book; and to us, the difference has been an enormous one. The second French Revolution has drawn its golden line between the past and the future. Humanity and its rights have emerged into the sunshine: we have beheld the marvellous spectacle (Mr. Moore called the impulse that produced it an “awful” one, and doubtless must have felt it so) of unworldly power taking its seat on the throne of worldly: and everything in future is not to be construed in favour of the great, and disfavour of those they differ with upon the strength of the old slavish misbelief.

Now mark on the other hand. If, instead of the enduring Reformer, thus beset with misfortunes, you had been a Lord,—rich, noted, and

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spoiled,—with every humour upon earth to indulge, and with the power to indulge it; if you had had no object in life, even when you seemed to have a better one, but to make a show and be talked of;—and if this Lord, so spoiled and perverted, partly by the flatteries of the very men who forsake the unfortunate, had been thought to commit almost every crime under the sun; was known to have been guilty of a thousand painful ebullitions of will and selfishness; to have disgusted the class that would have been proud of him, and the reformers with whom he pretended to sympathize; to have calumniated his friends; betrayed his guests to derision; hastened the ruin of the fortunes he pretended to raise, by giving them up to their enemies; and spared neither age nor sex in his resentment;—yet being a Lord, and having a table, and possessing other worldly advantages as well as genius enough to make his opinions and his favour of consequence; what excuse should not be found for him? How would not the doctrines of charity, which the other man had preached till he was hoarse, be brought up, solely in his favour? How would not some of his offences be denied with indignation, others contrasted with his good qualities, others secreted, others philosophized upon and excused, and all recommended to the consideration of our modesty, as the errors of a man of genius, without which, perhaps, he would not have been so great as he was? How many generous sentiments would not be expressed in pity to the men of excessive sensibility, who wounded everybody’s feelings? How would not fond servility have trembled at his displeasure, and been glad to take his blows? How would not all his claims, however ostentatious, have been admitted? How his satires and private libels have been treasured up? How his friends resolved not to forsake him, in spite of the insults he dealt to them all round? Nay, how would not his very confessions of offence have been received with fond deprecating smiles as whims of his Lordship’s not to be thought of,—mystifications of dull rogues, merely at the expence of a few women,—singular, jocose humours, in which it pleased his Lordship to be tragic,—and generous instances of that desire to be thought ill of, which marked his hatred of hypocrisy, and the extreme simplicity and goodness of heart, which was so natural to him.

Mr Moore, in his second volume, has ventured to speak of the “unworthy alliance” which Lord Byron made, with Mr Leigh Hunt when he set up The Liberal, of the “dross” of which that work was compounded, and of the “taint” with which his Lordship’s purities were to be infected by being mixed up in the same “pot-au-feu.” These images of the pot and sauce-pan are natural to Mr Moore, though in his show-shops he takes care to put his fillagree in the window. It is furthermore to be gathered from Lord Byron’s correspondence, that Mr Moore represented the faculties of Mr Leigh Hunt for periodical writing as “dead weight;” and wherever the name of that person is mentioned, Mr Moore does it with infinite airs and assumptions. We have observed, that we do not care for Mr Moore’s opinion with regard to our writings. We should value it if we thought it sincere, upon a song or a squib. But whatever it may be in our power to do in other matters, we have a poor opinion of his knowledge of what ought to be done. We shall bring additional reasons for it before we have finished these notices. Our immediate object is to show the inconsistency between the opinion which Mr Moore gave of Mr Leigh Hunt to Lord Byron after his former friend had fallen into adversity, and lost his public influence, and the one which he expressed to Mr Leigh Hunt himself when lords came to visit him, and when Mr Moore thought his good word of consequence. We again request the reader to keep in mind what we have stated respecting the object of these articles. We do not wish to “Sir,” or to bandy charges of this and that with Mr Moore, as the ladies “Madam” each other in the Beggar’s Opera, when Macheath is found our between them. We concede with hearty good-will his hero to Mr Moore, and the honours of what we suppose we are to call a “worthy” alliance. But we do not choose to risk any detriment possible to this new “dead-weight” of ours, The Tatler,—a germ, however poor, of precious promise of shelter to many heads; and in order to take away the last remaining chance of an ill-effect of Mr Moore’s opinions upon those of the public, we shall shew how little they are to be depended upon. His first volume may be forgotten by this time, and even in that volume, though there is the wish to think ill and to ridicule, Mr Moore has been compelled to be inconsistent by certain politic retrospections. He knew what his own conduct had argued in the first instance: he was aware that Lord Byron possessed letters; though, perhaps, he had forgotten those in the possession of Mr Leigh Hunt; at all events he has hampered his reputation for sincerity beyond retrieval. The reader will see, by the letters we are about to lay before him, that he who talked to Lord Byron about “dross,” and “taint,” and “dead-weight,” must, either to his Lordship or Mr Leigh Hunt, have been grossly insincere. Yet even this light is nothing to what he must appear in, when the reader sees his expressions of gratitude contrasted with the warnings he afterwards gave the noble lord against a connection with his former friend, on account of his being at a disadvantage with the world.

The letters commence in the year 1810, when Mr Leigh Hunt was Editor of The Examiner, and wrote the dramatic criticisms in that paper. The signature of the first was cut out to give away.