clerks." Here he picked up a little Italian from a
kindly old priest who had passed some time in Italy, and obtained a
"smattering of French" from an intelligent _emigre_, named La Frosse.
Here his tender mother watched over his boyhood, proud of his opening
promise, and hopeful, yet apprehensive, of his future. Here he and his
sister, "excellent Nell," acquired music, first upon an old harpsichord,
obtained by his father in discharge of a debt, and afterwards on a
piano, to buy which his loving mother had saved up all superfluous
pence. Hence he issued to lake country walks with unhappy Robert Emmet.
Hither he came--not less proudly, yet as fondly as ever--when college
magnates had given him honor, and the King's Viceroy had received him as
a guest.

In 1835 he records "a visit to No. 12, Aungier Street, where I was
born." "Visited every part of the house; the small old yard and its
appurtenances; the small, dark kitchen, where I used to have my bread
and milk; the front and back drawing-rooms; the bedrooms and
garrets,--murmuring, 'Only think, a grocer's still!'" "The many thoughts
that came rushing upon me, while thus visiting the house where the first
nineteen or twenty years of my life were passed, may be more easily
conceived than told." He records, with greater unction than he did his
visit to the Prince, his sitting with the grocer and his wife at their
table, and drinking in a glass of their wine her and her husband's "good
health." Thence he went, with all his "recollections of the old shop
about him," to a grand dinner at the Viceregal Lodge!

I spring with a single line from the year 1822, when I knew him first,
to the year 1845, when circumstances enabled us to enjoy the
long-looked-for happiness of visiting Moore and his beloved wife in
their home at Sloperton.

The poet was then in his sixty-fifth year, and had in a great measure
retired from actual labor; indeed, it soon became evident to us that the
faculty for enduring and continuous toil no longer existed. Happily, it
was not absolutely needed; for, with very limited wants, there was a
sufficiency,--a bare sufficiency, however, for there were no means to
procure either the elegances or the luxuries which so frequently become
the necessities of man, and a longing for which might have been excused
in one who had been the friend of peers and the associate of princes.

The forests and fields that surround Bowood, the mansion of the Marquis
of Lansdown