Thomas Moore

“ In poetry, as well as writing in general, it will never make entirely a poet or a poem; but neither poet nor poem will ever be good for any thing without it. It is the salt of society, and the seasoning of composition. Vulgarity is far worse than downright black-guardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times; while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things, 'signifying nothing.' It does not depend upon low themes, or even low-language, for Fielding revels in both;—but is he ever vulgar? ”

“ It was a new and inexplicable feeling, like rising from the grave, to me. Clare, too, was much agitated—more in appearance than was myself; for I could feel his heart beat to his fingers' ends, unless, indeed, it was the pulse of my own which made me think so. He told me that I should find a note from him left at Bologna. I did. We were obliged to part for our different journeys, he for Rome, I for Pisa, but with the promise to meet again in spring. We were but five minutes together, and on the public road; but I hardly recollect an hour of my existence which could be weighed against them. ”

“ If the Neapolitans have but a single Massaniello amongst them, they will beat the bloody butchers of the crown and sabre. Holland, in worse circumstances, beat the Spains and Philips; America beat the English; Greece beat Xerxes; and France beat Europe, till she took a tyrant; South America beats her old vultures out of their nest; and, if these men are but firm in themselves, there is nothing to shake them from without. ”

“ Lord Byron and I are excellent friends; and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claim to a higher station than I possess, or did I possess a higher than I deserve, we should appear in all things as such, and I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case: the demon of mistrust and of pride lurks between two persons in our situation, poisoning the freedom of our intercourse. ”

“ I am obliged to you for your good wishes, and more than obliged by the extract from the papers of the beloved object whose qualities you have so well described in a few words. I can assure you that all the fame which ever cheated humanity into higher notions of its own importance would never weigh in my mind against the pure and pious interest which a virtuous being may be pleased to take in my welfare. In this point of view, I would not exchange the prayer of the deceased in my behalf for the united glory of Homer, Cæsar, and Napoleon, could such be accumulated upon a living head. ”

“ That there are men of genius among the present poets makes little against the fact, because it has been well said, that 'next to him who forms the taste of his country, the greatest genius is he who corrupts it.' No one has ever denied genius to Marino, who corrupted not merely the taste of Italy, but that of all Europe for nearly a century. The great cause of the present deplorable state of English poetry is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope, in which, for the last few years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. ”

“ But I have lived in far countries abroad, or in the agitating world at home, which was not favourable to study or reflection; so that almost all I have written has been mere passion,—passion, it is true, of different kinds, but always passion: for in me (if it be not an Irishism to say so) my indifference was a kind of passion, the result of experience, and not the philosophy of nature. Writing grows a habit, like a woman's gallantry: there are women who have had no intrigue, but few who have had but one only ”

“ I did not indeed imagine, like Jean Jacques Rousseau, that all mankind was in a conspiracy against me, though I had perhaps as good grounds for such a chimera as ever he had; but I perceived that I had to a great extent become personally obnoxious in England, perhaps through my own fault, but the fact was indisputable; the public in general would hardly have been so much excited against a more popular character, without at least an accusation or a charge of some kind actually expressed or substantiated ”

“ I have set down, in tame Italian, the strongest reasons I can think of against the Swiss emigration. To tell you the truth, I should be very glad to accept as my fee his establishment in Tuscany. Ravenna is a miserable place: the people are barbarous and wild, and their language the most infernal patois that you can imagine. He would be in every respect better among the Tuscans.
"He has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan, which is astonishingly fine. It sets him not only above, but far above all the poets of the day. Every word has the stamp of immortality. ”

“ Pope himself 'sleeps well—nothing can touch him further;' but those who love the honour of their country, the perfection of her literature, the glory of her language, are not to be expected to permit an atom of his dust to be stirred in his tomb, or a leaf to be stripped from the laurel which grows over it. ”

“ But for whomever it was meant, I have read it with all the pleasure which can arise from so melancholy a topic. I say pleasure—because your brief and simple picture of the life and demeanour of the excellent person whom I trust you will again meet, cannot be contemplated without the admiration due to her virtues, and her pure and unpretending piety. Her last moments were particularly striking; and I do not know that, in the course of reading the story of mankind, and still less in my observations upon the existing portion, I ever met with any thing so unostentatiously beautiful. ”

“ But the world must at last learn how, with so good and generous a heart, Lord Byron, susceptible, it is true, of the most energetic passions, yet, at the same time, of the sublimest and most pure, and rendering homage in his acts to every virtue—how he, I say, could afford such scope to malice and to calumny. ”

“ Have Southey, or Coleridge, or Wordsworth, made a follower of renown? Wilson never did well till he set up for himself in the 'City of the Plague.' Has Moore, or any other living writer of reputation, had a tolerable imitator, or rather disciple? Now it is remarkable that almost all the followers of Pope, whom I have named, have produced beautiful and standard works, and it was not the number of his imitators who finally hurt his fame, but the despair of imitation, and the ease of not imitating him sufficiently. ”

“ It is this very harmony, particularly in Pope, which has raised the vulgar and atrocious cant against him:—because his versification is perfect, it is assumed that it is his only perfection; because his truths are so clear, it is asserted that he has no invention; and because he is always intelligible, it is taken for granted that he has no genius. We are sneeringly told that he is the 'Poet of Reason,' as if this was a reason for his being no poet. ”

“ I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state? ”

“ An Englishman, a friend to liberty, having understood that the Neapolitans permit even foreigners to contribute to the good cause, is desirous that they should do him the honour of accepting a thousand louis, which he takes the liberty of offering. Having already, not long since, been an ocular witness of the despotism of the Barbarians in the States occupied by them in Italy, he sees, with the enthusiasm natural to a cultivated man, the generous determination of the Neapolitans to assert their well-won independence. ”

“ It must have been expensive, though;—I would not pay the price of a Thorwaldsen bust for any human head and shoulders, except Napoleon's, or my children's, or some 'absurd womankind's,' as Monkbarns calls them,—or my sister's. If asked why, then, I sat for my own?—Answer, that it was at the particular request of J.C. Hobhouse, Esq. and for no one else. A picture is a different matter;—every body sits for their picture;—but a bust looks like putting up pretensions to permanency, and smacks something of a hankering for public fame rather than private remembrance. ”

“ If 'Cain' be 'blasphemous,' Paradise Lost is blasphemous; and the very words of the Oxford gentleman, 'Evil, be thou my good,' are from that very poem, from the mouth of Satan, and is there any thing more in that of Lucifer in the Mystery? Cain is nothing more than a drama, not a piece of argument. If Lucifer and Cain speak as the first murderer and the first rebel may be supposed to speak, surely all the rest of the personages talk also according to their characters—and the stronger passions have ever been permitted to the drama. ”

“ For the first time since his arrival in Italy, he now found himself tempted to give dinner parties; his guests being, besides Count Gamba and Shelley, Mr. Williams, Captain Medwin, Mr. Taafe, and Mr. Trelawney;—and "never," as his friend Shelley used to say, "did he display himself to more advantage than on these occasions; being at once polite and cordial, full of social hilarity and the most perfect good humour; never diverging into ungraceful merriment, and yet keeping up the spirit of liveliness throughout the evening." ”

“ The young Gamba, who was, at this time, but twenty years of age, with a heart full of all those dreams of the regeneration of Italy, which not only the example of Naples, but the spirit working beneath the surface all around him, inspired, had, together with his father, who was still in the prime of life, become enrolled in the secret bands now organising throughout Romagna, and Lord Byron was, by their intervention, admitted also among the brotherhood. ”

“ I have published a pamphlet on the Pope controversy, which you will not like. Had I known that Keats was dead—or that he was alive and so sensitive—I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry, to which I was provoked by his attack upon Pope, and my disapprobation of his own style of writing.
"You want me to undertake a great poem—I have not the inclination nor the power. As I grow older, the indifference—not to life, for we love it by instinct—but to the stimuli of life, increases. ”

“ But they have been joined in it by those who have joined them in nothing else: by the Edinburgh Reviewers, by the whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets, excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's poetry with my whole soul, and hope to do so till my dying day. ”

“ But I thought that I had explained my causes of bile—at least to you. Some instances of vacillation, occasional neglect, and troublesome sincerity, real or imagined, are sufficient to put your truly great author and man into a passion. But reflection, with some aid from hellebore, hath already cured me 'pro tempore;' and, if it had not, a request from you and Hobhouse would have come upon me like two out of the 'tribus Anticyris,'—with which, however, Horace despairs of purging a poet. ”

“ I have gone upon the notion of Cuvier, that the world has been destroyed three or four times, and was inhabited by mammoths, behemoths, and what not; but not by man till the Mosaic period, as, indeed, is proved by the strata of bones found;—those of all unknown animals, and known, being dug out, but none of mankind. I have, therefore, supposed Cain to be shown, in the rational Preadamites, beings endowed with a higher intelligence than man, but totally unlike him in form, and with much greater strength of mind and person. ”

“ On a tree at Lord Bathurst's is carved, 'Here Pope sang,'—he composed beneath it. Bolingbroke, in one of his letters, represents them both writing in a hayfield. No poet ever admired Nature more, or used her better, than Pope has done, as I will undertake to prove from his works, prose and verse, if not anticipated in so easy and agreeable a labour. ”

“ Sir William Temple observes, 'That of all the members of mankind that live within the compass of a thousand years, for one man that is born capable of making a great poet there may be a thousand born capable of making as great generals and ministers of state as any in story.' Here is a statesman's opinion of poetry: it is honourable to him and to the art. Such a 'poet of a thousand years' was Pope. A thousand years will roll away before such another can be hoped for in our literature. But it can want them—he himself is a literature.
"One word upon his so brutally abused translation of Homer. ”

“ As a proof, I am educating my natural daughter a strict Catholic in a convent of Romagna; for I think people can never have enough of religion, if they are to have any. I incline, myself, very much to the Catholic doctrines; but if I am to write a drama, I must make my characters speak as I conceive them likely to argue.
"As to poor Shelley, who is another bugbear to you and the world, he is, to my knowledge, the least selfish and the mildest of men—a man who has made more sacrifices of his fortune and feelings for others than any I ever heard of. ”

“ We were divided in choice between Switzerland and Tuscany, and I gave my vote for Pisa, as nearer the Mediterranean, which I love for the sake of the shores which it washes, and for my young recollections of 1809. Switzerland is a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. ”

“ His connection with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him. He lives in considerable splendour, but within his income, which is now about four thousand a year, one thousand of which he devotes to purposes of charity. He has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued; and he is becoming, what he should be, a virtuous man. The interest which he took in the politics of Italy, and the actions he performed in consequence of it, are subjects not fit to be written, but are such as will delight and surprise you. ”