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in an unfriendly guise, and with unfriendly language, or had he been base enough to have flattered the man whom he had criticised, he could have accounted for such treatment; as it was, he was forced to regard it as a breach of the laws of common courtesy, as a specimen of the wretched airs of aristocracy which upstarts often assume-as the action of a coxcomb, not a gentleman-and we understand told the historian so in language which he is not likely soon to forget or to forgive. Leigh Hunt is incapable, both from geniality and gentlemanly feeling, of such conduct as this. He always dips his pen in a reservoir compounded of warm blood and of the milk of human kindness. This element, indeed, bathes his whole being and person. It swims in his restless eye-it throbs in his hot hand-it, and not age's winter, seems to have whitened his locks-it gushes out in the jets and sparkles of his conversation, which is yet evidently only the relic of what it was in earlier times-and it is the mild or mirthful inspiration of his various writings.

Had Hunt been a less sincerc and simple-minded person than he has been, he might, we think, have been quite as popular a writer as Thomas Moore. He has the champagne qualities of that writer, without, indeed, so many or such brilliant bubbles of wit and fancy upon the top-and has a world more of body, solidity, and truth. It is his assuming the fairy shape, that has made some (ourselves at one time included) to underrate his powers. But why did he assume it? Why did he, like the devils in Milton, shrink his stature to gain admission to the halls of Pandemonium? Why did he not rather, in dignified humility, wait without as he was till the great main door was opened, and till in full size and panoply he entered in, and sat down a giant among giants, a god amidst gods? In such figured language we convey our notion at once of Hunt's strength and weakness. He has been, partly owing to circumstances, and partly to himself, little other than a glorious trifler. He has smiled, lounged, or teased, or translated, away faculties which, proper concentration and a perpetual view toward one single object, had been incalculably beneficial to the general progress of literature and of man.

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Moore again seems made for trifling. It is his element. The window pane being his world, may we not call him the

fly? His love is skin-deep; his anger, too, is a mere itch on the surface; his patriotism is easy, beginning and ending at the piano; his friendship all oozes out in a memoir of his departed friend; his hatred is exhausted in a single satire: and even his melody, while suiting the ivory keys of Lady Blessington's harpsichord, shrinks from the full diapason the organ or the terrible unity of the fife; he has no powers which earnestness would much care to challenge as her own Hunt, on the contrary, has put martial faculties upon perpe tual parade-they have walked to and fro to beautiful music. but they have rarely mounted the breach, or even seen the enemy. This has not sprung either from the want of power or of courage, but from a kind of amiable ease of temper ament, and, perhaps, also from a defect of constitutional stamina. A soul of fire has been yoked to a nervous and

feeble constitution.

We can hardly charge the author of forty volumes with having written little, but, perhaps there is not one among all those volumes to which you can point as entirely worthy, and fully reflective, of the powers which are visible in all. Throughout them all you have a beautiful diffusion—over many of them hangs a certain weary languor-in some you are saluted with an explosion of wit like the crackers of a birthnight-and the others are full of a pensive poetry, tremulous with sentiment, and starred with the strangest and most expressive epithets. Heart, geniality, humanity, and genius pervade the whole.

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Altogether, we cannot but look upon Hunt's present po sition as an enviable and fortunate one. He is in the evening of his days, but at evening time it is light with him; has outlived many a struggle; he has survived a storm in which many larger ships were wrecked; he has not nows single enemy; his name is a household word throughout world; his fame is dear to every lover of poetry and of berty; the government of his country has appreciated and rewarded his services. Whatever of the fierce or bitter cir cumstances had infused into his mind has now been extract ed. Above all, milder and juster views of Christianity.its claims and character, seem entering his mind. We W not, therefore, close by wishing him happiness-it is his, we

trust, already—but by wishing him long life to enjoy the meek and bright sunset of his chequered and troublesome day.*

THOMAS MOORE.

To be the poet par excellence of Ireland, the cleverest man in the cleverest nation in the world, is to hold no mean position, and that position we claim for Thomas Moore. We do not of course mean that he is by many degrees the greatest poet at present alive; but for sparkle, wit, and brilliance, his country's qualities, he is unsurpassed. The bard of the butterflies, he is restless, gay, and gorgeous as the beautiful creatures he delights to depict. It would require his own style adequately to describe itself. Puck putting a girdle. round about the globe in forty minutes-Ariel doing his spiriting gently the Scotch fairy footing it in the moonlight, the stillness of which seems intended to set off the lively and aerial motion-any of these figures may faintly express to us the elegant activities of Moore's mind and fancy. never able to disconnect from his idea that of minuteness.

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It is as a "creature
Does he flutter in
Does he hover over

Does he play in the "plighted clouds ?" of the element," as tiny as he is tricksy. the sunbeam? It is as a bright mote. the form and face of beauty? It is as a sylph-like sprite, his little heart surcharged and his small wings trembling with passion. Does he ever enter on a darker and more daring flight? It is still rather the flight of a fire-fly than of a meteor or a comet. Does he assail powers and potentates? It is with a sting rather than a spear-a sting small, sharp, bright, and deadly.

Thomas Moore is a poet by temperament, and by intellect a wit. He has the warmth and the fancy of the poet,

We owe our readers an apology for the brief notices this article contains of authors elsewhere in the book characterized at large. They belonged to the article, and we could not prevail on ourselves to erase

them.

but hardly his powerful passion, his high solemn imagination or his severe unity of purpose. His verses, therefore, are rather the star-dust of poetry than the sublime thing itself. Every sentence he writes is poetical, but the whole is not a poem. The dancing lightness of his motion affects you with very different feelings from those with which you contemplate the grave walk of didactic or the stormy race of impassioned poetry. You are delighted, you are dazzled; you wonder at the rapidity of the movements, the elegance of the attitudes, the perfect self-command and mastery of the performer; you cry out "Encore, encore," but you seldom weep; you do not tremble or agonize; you do not become silent. Did the reader ever feel the blinding and giddy effect of level winter sunbeams pouring through the intervals of a railing as he went along? This is precisely the effect which Moore's rapid and bickering brilliance produces. Our mental optics are dazzled, our brain reels, we almost sicken of the monotonous and incessant splendor, "distinct but distant, clear, but ah, how cold!"

Our great quarrel with Moore's poetry, apart from its early sins against morality and good taste, is its want of deep carnestness and of high purpose. Not more trivial is the dance of a fairy in the pale shine of the moon, than are the majority of his poems. And though he did belong to that beautiful family, he could not in his poetry meddle less with the great purposes, passions, and destinies of humanity. What to him are the ongoings and future prospects of what Oberon so finely calls the "human mortals?" He must have his dance and his song out. We believe that Thomas Moore is a sincere lover of his kind, and has a deep sympathy with their welfare and progress, but we could scarcely deduce this with any certainty from his serious poetry. deed, the term serious, as applied to his verse, is a total misnomer. Byron's poetry has often a sincerity of anguish about it which cannot be mistaken; he howls out, like the blinded Cyclops, his agony to earth and heaven. The verse of Wordsworth and Coleridge is a harmony solemn as that of the pines in the winter blast. Elliott's earnestness is

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almost terrific. But Moore flits, and flutters, and leaps, and runs, a very Peri, but who shall never be permitted to enter the paradise of highest song, and to whom the seventh heaven of invention is shut for ever.

It were needless to dilate upon the beauties which he has scattered around him in this unprofitable career. His fancy is prodigious in quantity and variety, and is as elegant as it is abundant. Images dance down about us like hailstones, illustrations breathlessly run after outrun illustrations, fine and delicate shades melt into others still finer and more delicate, and often the general effect of his verse is like that of a large tree alive with bees, where a thousand sweet and minute tones are mingled in one hum of harmony. Add to this his free flow of exquisite versification, the richness of his luscious descriptions, the tenderness of many of his pictures, and the sunny glow, as of eastern day, which colors the whole, and you have the leading features of his poetical idiosyncrasy.

But it is as a wit and a satirist that Moore must survive. There is no "horse play in his raillery." It is as delicate as it is deadly. He carves his foeman as a "dish fit for the gods, not hews him as a carcass meet for hounds." Such a gay gladiator, such a smiling murderer as he is! How small his weapon-how elegant his. flourishes-how light but sinewy his arm--and how soon is the blow given the deed done--the victim prostrate! His strokes are so keen that ere you have felt them you have found death. He is an

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aristocratic satirist not only in the objects but in the manner of his attack. Coarse game would not feel that fine tremulous edge by which he dissects his highbred and sensitive foes to the quick. We notice, too, in his sarcastic vein, and this very probably explains its superiority, a much deeper and heartier earnestness. When he means to be serious he trifles, when he trifles it is that he is most sincere. work is play, his play is work. All his political feeling-all the moral indignation he possesses-all the hatred which as an Irishman and a gentleman he entertains for insincerity, humbug, and selfishness in high places-come out through the veil of his witty and elegant verse. Of a great satirist, only one element seems wanting in Moore, namely, that cool concentrated malignity which inspires Juvenal and Junius. He hates, they loathe. He tickles his opponent to death, they tear him to pieces. His arrows are polished, theirs are poisoned. His malice is that of a man, theirs is that of a demon. His wish is to gain a great end over the bodies of

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