es of this kitchen-garden is a raised
bank,"--the poet's "terrace-walk," so he loved to call it. Here a small
deal table stood through all weathers; for it was his custom to compose
as he walked, and at this table to pause and write down his thoughts.
Hence he had always a view of the setting sun; and I believe nothing on
earth gave him more intense pleasure than practically to realize the
line,--

"How glorious the sun looked in sinking!"--

for, as Mrs. Moore has since told us, he very rarely missed this sight.

In 1811, the year of his marriage, he lived at York Terrace, Queen's
Elm, Brompton. Mrs. Moore tells me it was a pretty house: the Terrace
was then isolated, and opposite nursery-gardens. Long afterwards (in
1824) he went to Brompton to "indulge himself with a sight of that
house." In 1812 he was settled at Kegworth; and in 1813, at Mayfield
Cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. Of Mayfield, one of his friends,
who twenty years afterwards accompanied him there to see it, remarks on
the small, solitary, and now wretched-looking cottage, where all the
fine "orientalism" and "sentimentalism" had been engendered. Of this
cottage he himself writes,--"It was a poor place, little better than a
barn; but we at once took it and set about making it habitable."

As Burns was made a gauger because he was partial to whiskey, Moore was
made Colonial Secretary at Bermuda, where his principal duty was to
"overhaul the accounts of skippers and their mates." Being called to
England, his affairs were placed in charge of a superintendent, who
betrayed him, and left him answerable for a heavy debt, which rendered
necessary a temporary residence in Paris. That debt, however, was paid,
not by the aid of friends, some of whom would have gladly relieved him
of it, but literally by "the sweat of his brow." Exactly so it was when
the MS. "Life of Byron" was burned: it was by Moore, and not by the
relatives of Byron, (neither was it by aid of friends,) the money he had
received was returned to the publisher who had advanced it. "The
glorious privilege of being independent" was, indeed, essentially
his,--in his boyhood, throughout his manhood, and in advanced
age,--always!

In 1799 he came to London to enter at the Middle Temple. (His first
lodging was at 44, George Street, Portman Square.) Very soon afterwards
we find him declining a loan of money proffered him by Lady Donegal. He
thanked God for the many sweet things of this