The Times Great Irish Lives: Obituaries of Ireland’s Finest

TOM MOORE

1 MARCH 1852

THE ELEGY OF TOM MOORE should not contain one mournful or distressing note! Flourishing in an age of poets – of men who have stamped their characters upon the literature of their country and earned undying fame – he takes his ground as fairly as the best of them. Within his sphere he is unapproachable. He has little in common with the stormy passion of Byron; the philosophical grandeur of Coleridge is unknown to him; the muse of Scott and his own are scarcely kindred cousins; his productions have as little of the dreamy and mystical splendour of Shelley as they are allied to the elaborate and fatiguing epics of Southey; but within the circle of his own uncontested dominion he has poured forth strains as exquisite as any fancy ever clothed in sparkling verse to delight the jocund heart of man. The mind of Moore, from the moment that he took pen in hand, may be said to have been always in a state of pleasure. He has written satires as well as songs, and dealt with themes both sacred and profane: he has described the loves of angels and the holy piety of erring mortals; but, whatever the employment, one condition of feeling is always manifest. Most musical, most happy was his genius, and music and joyousness are careering in almost every syllable that he spoke …

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on the 30th of May, 1780, the son of a small tradesman, who afterwards became a quartermaster in the army. It is not easy to decide when he first attempted verse. Upon looking back he could not discover when he was not a scribbler. In his thirteenth year he was already a contributor to a magazine; in his fourteenth he had addressed a sonnet to his school-master; and some three years before he sent his productions to the Irish periodical he had distinguished himself in another branch of art by undertaking principal characters in amateur theatricals. Moore was privileged to be precocious without paying the penalty of precocity. When he was 12 years old he accompanied his father, a Roman Catholic, to a patriotic dinner held in honour of the French Revolution, then a recent event, and regarded, as he himself tells us, as a signal to the slave, wherever suffering, that “the day of his deliverance was near at hand.” Men’s hearts, it has been written, are cradled into poetry by wrong. The early genius of Moore was, no doubt, nurtured by the sufferings of his race, and maintained in vigour and freshness until the decaying music of his native land came to claim him wholly as her own. The act of Parliament having opened the University to Roman Catholics in 1793, the young poet immediately availed himself of his opportunity. The year following his admission, while still a child, he wrote and published a paraphrase of Anacreon’s fifth ode, and then proceeded to the translation of other odes by the same poet, for which he vainly hoped the university board might deem him “deserving of some honour or reward.” Disappointed in his expectation he nevertheless continued his task, and occupied himself in improving his verses and illustrating them by learned annotations, until he reached his 19th year, when he quitted Ireland for the first time, and set out for London “with the two not very congenial objects of keeping his terms in the Middle Temple and publishing by subscription his translation of Anacreon.” The translation duly appeared in 1800. It was dedicated to George IV., then Prince of Wales, who, we may remark, received no further honour at the poet’s hands.

In 1803 Moore had the misfortune to obtain worldly advancement. He was promoted to an official situation in Bermuda. The duties of the office were performed by a deputy, and the consequence, was great personal anxiety and heavy pecuniary loss to the poetical principal …

Moore’s birth and origin made him a Liberal and something more. He came into the world one of a then oppressed race. He was the contemporary and schoolfellow of an ardent band who believed all things lawful to the struggler for liberty, and his spirit went with them in their most daring aspirations. The hapless victims of their own rash, ill conceived, and unwarrantable projects for national emancipation were his chosen and beloved associates, and when he saw them sacrificed to their wild enthusiasm he cherished the passion that had consumed them and embalmed their memory in matchless melody and verse. In middle life Moore, favoured by the friendship of the great Whig chiefs, soothed by the concessions that had been made to his country and his creed, and warned by sober experience of the vanity of egregious expectation, settled down into a constitutional Whig; but at the starting point of his career he had as little affection for Whigs as for Tories. In the preface to one of a series of solemn satires, he speaks of both “factions” as “having been equally cruel to Ireland, and perhaps equally insincere in their efforts for the liberties of England.”

Moore had no cause to remember with pleasure either the prose or the poetry of these satirical exercises. Serious satire was at no time his forte – his lively and delicate hand could hardly wield the heavy weaponry of Dryden and Pope. Greater success attended his efforts when at a later period of his life he divested himself of his sombre attire, and became as joyous in hate as he had been in love. The Fudge Family, written in 1817, The Twopenny Postbag, and similar productions full of point, wit, and polish, are unrivalled as political lampoons, and preserve to this hour, their first exquisite relish. The generous fancy of the Irish poet could not be happy steeped in bitterness, and to affect sternness was to languish and die. The objects of Moore’s squib warfare were no doubt sufficiently conscious of the sharpness of an airy weapon, never otherwise than most dexterously handled by their foe; but we question whether they suffered half as much pain as they enjoyed pleasure from his lively feats. How could men be seriously angry with an adversary who simply tickled when he pretended to strike?

The apprenticeship of Moore was served when he commenced The Irish Melodies which have rendered his name famous wherever music is cherished. From that hour his genius triumphed, and most deservedly. Moore attributes all his poetical success to his strong and inborn feeling for music. There can be no doubt that his obligations to nature in this respect were very great. Music and poetry were wedded in his heart, and were inseparable. So intimately, indeed, were they united, that the sight of The Irish Melodies crowded together in one volume, unaccompanied by the notes with which they were always associated in his own mind, inflicted upon him positive pain. It was as if he saw the skeletons of his children ranged before him, deprived of the warm flesh and breathing form. To the reader the verses have beauty of their own, and charm irrespective of the strains by which they were suggested. Moore could no more unbind melody and language than he could gaze on female beauty and separate the notions of body and soul.

The publication of The Irish Melodies commenced in 1807, and, continued at intervals, was concluded in 1834. They have been translated into Latin, Italian, French, and Russian, and are familiar as proverbs amongst the fellow-countrymen of the poet, and indeed wherever English is understood and music loved. It is difficult for the critic to refer to them in too high a tone of panegyric. It may be true that force and dignity are wanting to some of those lyrics, that occasionally fancy labours until art becomes too evident in strained and frigid similes, that ornament at times overlays sentiment until nature pants beneath the glittering encumbrance; but it is equally certain that universal literature does not present a lovelier and more affecting tribute to a nation’s minstrelsy than is found in The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore. The love of country that pervades and inspires his theme, his simple tenderness of feeling, that at once strikes the heart as instantly to melt it, his facility of creation, linked vith the glad appreciation of all that is beautiful in nature – the grace, the elegance, the sensibility, the ingenuity, that are never absent – the astonishing and thoroughly successful adaptation of sense to sound, of sweetest poetry to thrilling music, – are claims to admiration which the most prosaic of his species will find it impossible to resist or gainsay.

The year 1812 found Moore, in his 32nd year, enjoying well-earned fame, but on circumscribed ground. He had not as yet given to the world a long and continuous work, and shown how well he could sustain the brilliancy that seemed too keenly elaborate for a protracted effort. In that year, however, the poet resolved to take the field against his most favoured competitors, and to attempt a poem upon an Oriental subject. In 1817 Lalla Rookh appeared … The poem was hailed with a burst of admiration from sceptics as well as believers.

And no wonder! It was a triple triumph of industry, learning, and genius. The broad canvas exhibited a gorgeous painting; from beginning to end the same lavish ornament, the same overpowering sweetness, the same variegated and delicate tracery, the same revelling of a spirit happy in its intense enjoyment of beauty that characterized the miniatures and gems that heretofore had proceeded from the artist’s pencil. So far from betraying a diminution of power, or an inability to maintain his high-pitched note, the poet pursued his strain until he fairly left his reader languishing with a surfeit of luscious song, and faint from its oppressive odours. We peruse the romance, and marvel at the miraculous facility of a writer who has but to open his lips to drop emeralds and pearls, like the good princess in the fairy tale. Nor does astonishment cease when we learn, that eager and all but involuntary as the verse appears to issue from its source, the apparently effortless composition is actually a labour performed with all the diligence of the mechanic and all the forethought of science. In his life of Sheridan, Moore informs us that many of the impromptu jokes of Richard Brinsley owed much of their point and off-hand brilliancy to the time and pains previously bestowed upon their manufacture. His own seemingly spontaneous and easy cadences were wrought most patiently at the anvil. But the time spent in the composition of Lalla Rookh, though it extended over years, was as nothing compared with the time given to preparation for the subject. For months Moore saturated his mind with Oriental reading, in order to familiarize himself with Oriental illustration, and with the view especially of educating his fancy for its essential and peculiar work. The research and industry of the poet were immense. He tells us himself that “it was amidst the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters, in a lone cottage amongst the fields, that he found himself enabled by that concentration of thought, which retirement alone gives, to call up around him some of the sunniest of his eastern scenes.” He had devoured every book he could get relating to the East, and did not rise from his occupation until he positively knew more of Persia than of his own country, and until his acclimated genius found it as easy to draw inspiration from the influences of a land he had never seen as from the living and silent forms by which, in his own country, he had been from his childhood surrounded. Eastern travellers and Oriental scholars have borne testimony to the singular accuracy of Moore’s descriptive pen … The poem, translated into Persian, has found its way to Ispalian, and is thoroughly appreciated on the shores of the Caspian. In London the poem looks like an exotic; there it is racy of the soil.

In the autumn of 1817, and in the fulness of his triumph, Moore visited Paris with Mr Rogers, and picked up, as we have already noted, the materials of his Fudge Family, a satire written on the plan of the New Bath Guide, and intended to help the political friends of the satirist at the expense of their opponents. Time has taken away from much of the interest that attaches to these squibs of the hour, but age can never blunt the point of their polished wit or dull its brilliancy. The popularity of the Fudge Family kept pace with that of Lalla Rookh. ln 1819 the poet went abroad again, this time with Lord John Russell. The travellers proceeded in company by the Simplon into Italy, but soon parted company, Lord John Russell to proceed to Genoa, Moore to visit Lord Byron in Venice. Moore had made the acquaintance of Byron in 1812, when the latter, then in his 20th year, had just taken the world by surprise with his publication of the earlier cantos of Childe Harolde. The poets took to each other as soon as they met, and their friendship continued unimpaired until death divided them. This tour yielded Rhymes on the Road, a volume of sketches which in no way added to the writer’s reputation, since it lacks all that is chiefly characteristic of his genius. Nature in Italy charmed Moore much more than art. At Rome he visited the great collections with Chantrey and Jackson, but was a stranger to the lively impressions received by his companions. The glorious sunset witnessed in ascending the Simplon lingered on his spirit long after the united glories of Rome, Florence, Turin, and Milan were obliterated from his memory.

Returning from Rome, Moore took up his abode in Paris, in which capital he resided until the year 1822. The conduct of the deputy in Bermuda had thrown the poet into difficulties, and until he could struggle out of them a return to England was incompatible with safety. There were not wanting friends to run to the rescue, but Moore honourably undertook to provide for his own misfortunes. Declining all offers of help, he took heart, and resolutely set to work for his deliverance. After much negotiation, the claims of the American merchants against him were brought down from 6,000 guineas to 1,000. Towards this reduced amount the friends of the offending deputy subscribed 300l. The balance (750l.) was deposited “by a dear and distinguished friend” of the principal in the hands of a banker, to be in readiness for the final “settlement of the demand.” A few months after the settlement was effected Moore received 1,000l. for his Loves of the Angels and 500l. for the Fables of the Holy Alliance. With half of these united sums he discharged his obligation to his benefactor …

In 1825 Moore wrote a Life of Sheridan, in 1830 he issued his Notices of the Life of Lord Byron, and in the following year the Memoirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, in all the biographies maintaining his well-earned position. In his Life of Sheridan he did not shrink from the difficulties of history. To borrow the language of a critic of the time, “he did not hide the truth under too deep a veil, neither did he blazon it forth.” Of Byron, Moore thought more tenderly than the majority of his contemporaries. The character of the staunch ally, old associate, and brother bard, is finely painted in the Notices, and, to the honour of Moore be it said, he knew how to stand by his departed friend while fulfilling his obligations to the public, whom it was his business to instruct. The life of the amiable, but weak-minded and luckless Lord Edward Fitzgerald, is the least noteworthy of Moore’s efforts of this kind. The History of Ireland, published from time to time in Lardner’s Cyclopedia, we believe to be the latest, as it is the most elaborate and serious, of our author’s compositions.

For many years in the enjoyment of a pension conferred upon him by his political friends, Moore quietly resided in his cottage near Devizes, in Wiltshire, from which he occasionally emerged to find a glad and hearty welcome among the best-born and most highly-gifted of his countrymen. During such separations from home it was the habit of the poet to correspond daily with his wife. The letters written at these times, are preserved, to be incorporated, we trust, in the diary of his life, upon which Moore was busily engaged. Mrs Moore survives her husband, but his four children have preceded him to the grave.

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FATHER MATHEW

12 DECEMBER 1856

THE DEPARTURE OF a great and good man from among us, and the loss of one whose charity and good deeds were of more than European reputation, seem to call for a more extended notice than that which appeared in the columns of our Irish intelligence yesterday. The history of “Father Mathew” is strange and striking, and almost partakes of the character of romance. It has often been said, by way of reproach against Ireland, that her clergy are almost all chosen, not from the nobles or the landed gentry and middle classes of Ireland, but from “the lowest of the people,” and that her priests have been chosen from the plough-tail and the pigstye. However this may be it was not the case with the subject of our memoir. Theobald Mathew was descended from a very ancient Welsh family, whose pedigree is carried in the records of the principality to Gwaythooed, King of Cardigan, in direct descent from whom was Sir David Mathew, standard-bearer to Edward IV., whose monument is to be seen in the cathedral of Llandaff. Edmund Mathew, his descendant in the sixth generation, High-Sheriff of Glamorgan in 1592, had two sons, who went to Ireland in the reign of James I. The elder son, George, married Lady Thurles, mother of “the great” Duke of Ormonde …

We believe that Theobald Mathew, son of James Mathew, of Thomastown, county Tipperary, was born at that place on the 10th of October, 1790 … At the age of 13 he was sent to the lay academy of Kilkenny, whence he was removed in his 20th year to Maynooth to pursue his ecclesiastical studies, having shown signs of a clerical vocation. On Easter Sunday, 1814, he was ordained in Dublin by the late Archbishop Murray. After some time he returned to Kilkenny with the intention of joining the mission of two Capuchin friars there; but before long he removed to Cork. By a rescript from the late Pope Gregory XVI. he received the degree of Doctor in Divinity, together with a dispensation allowing him to possess property. From the moment of entering upon his missionary duties at Cork he began to show the sterling worth of his character. Ever diligent in his work of the pulpit, the confessional, and the sick man’s bedside, he devoted all his spare time, not to violent agitation like Dr Cahill and other ecclesiastical firebrands, but to the temporal and spiritual wants of the poor, to whom he acted as counsellor, friend, treasurer, and executor. He acted as a magistrate as well as a minister, and thus composed feuds, secured justice to the oppressed, and healed the broken peace of many a family. His charities kept pace with his exertions, and were only limited by his means. Among other good deeds, Father Mathew himself purchased the Botanic Gardens of that city, and, allowing them to retain their former agreeable walks and statuary (the best specimens of Hogan’s native genius), he converted them into a cemetery, not for Catholics alone, but for members of every other denomination. To the poor burial was allowed gratuitously, and the fees derived from all other interments were devoted to charity. About the same time he commenced building a beautiful Gothic church at the cost of about 15,000l.

Thus, by the force of his well-known character as a genuine Christian patriot, even before the commencement of the Temperance movement in the south of Ireland, Father Mathew had risen to the highest estimation among his people. The affability of his manners, his readiness to listen to every grief and care, and, if possible, to remove it, the pure and self-sacrificing spirit of his entire career, were eminently calculated to seize upon the quick, warm impulses of the Irish heart, and to make his word law. Some 20 years ago there was no country in which the vice of intoxication had spread more devastation than in Ireland. All efforts to restrain it were in vain. The late Sir Michael O’Loghlen’s Act for the Suppression of Drunkenness was a dead letter; many even of the wise and good deemed it hopeless and incurable, and it was said that the Irish would abandon their nature before they abandoned their whisky.

There were those who thought otherwise. Some members of the Society of Friends and a few other individuals at Cork had bound themselves into an association for the suppression of drunkenness, but were unable to make head against the torrent. In their despair these gentlemen, though Protestants, applied to Father Mathew. Father Mathew responded to the call; with what success ultimately we suppose that our readers are all well aware. The work, however, was not the work of a day. For a year and a half he toiled and laboured against the deep-rooted degradation of the “Boys” of Cork, the ridicule and detraction of many doubtful friends, and the discountenance of many others from whom he had expected support. At length he had the satisfaction of seeing the mighty mass of obdurate indifference begin to move; some of the most obdurate drunkards in Cork enrolled their names in his “Total Abstinence Association.” His fame began to travel along the banks of the Shannon. First, the men of Kilrush came in to be received, then some hundreds from Kerry and Limerick; until, early in the month of August, 1839, the movement burst out into one universal flame. The first great outbreak was at Limerick, where Father Mathew had engaged to preach at the request of the bishop; and the mayor of which city declared that within 10 months no less than 150 inquests had been held in the county, one half of which were on persons whose deaths had been occasioned by intoxication. As soon as the country people heard that Father Mathew was in Limerick they rushed into the city in thousands. So great was the crush, that though no violence was used the iron railings which surrounded the residence of “the Apostle of Temperance” were torn down, and some scores of people precipitated into the Shannon … We have not the time or the space to follow Father Mathew in his Temperance progresses. Some idea of their results may be formed when we state that at Nenagh 20,000 persons are said to have taken the pledge in one day; 100,000 at Galway in two days; in Loughrea, 80,000 in two days; between that and Portumna from 180,000 to 200,000; and in Dublin about 70,000 during five days. There are few towns in Ireland which Father Mathew did not visit with like success. In 1844 he visited Liverpool, Manchester, and London; and the enthusiasm with which he was received there and in other English cities testified equally to the need and to the progress of the remedy.