what company, seldom a day passed that he did not write a letter to
Bessy. The home enjoyments, reading to her, making her the depositary of
all his thoughts and hopes,--they were his deep delights, compensations
for time spent amid scenes and with people who had no space in his
heart. Even when in "terrible request," his thoughts and his heart were
there,--in

"That dear Home, that saving Ark,
Where love's true light at last I've found,
Cheering within, when all grows dark
And comfortless and stormy round."

This is the tribute of Earl Russell to the wife of the poet Moore:--"The
excellence of his wife's moral character, her energy and courage, her
persevering economy, made her a better and even a richer partner to
Moore than an heiress of ten thousand a year would have been, with less
devotion to her duty, and less steadiness of conduct." Moore speaks of
his wife's "democratic pride." It was the pride that was ever above a
mean action, and which sustained him in the proud independence that
marked his character from birth to death.

In March, 1846, his diary contains this sad passage:--"The last of my
five children is gone, and we are left desolate and alone. Not a single
relation have I in this world." His father had died in 1825; his sweet
mother in 1832; "excellent Nell" in 1846; and his children one after
another, three of them in youth, and two grown up to manhood,--his two
boys, Tom and Russell, the first-named of whom died in Africa in 1846,
an officer in the French service; the other at Sloperton in 1842, soon
after his return from India, having been compelled by ill-health to
resign his commission as a lieutenant in the Twenty-Fifth Regiment.

In 1835 the influence of Lord Lansdowne obtained for Moore a pension of
three hundred pounds a year from Lord Melbourne's government,--"as due
from any government, but much more from one some of the members of which
are proud to think themselves your friends." The "wolf, poverty,"
therefore, in his latter years, did not prowl so continually about his
door. But there was no fund for luxuries, none for the extra comforts
that old age requires. Mrs. Moore now lives on a crown pension of one
hundred pounds a year, and the interest of the sum of three thousand
pounds,--the sum advanced by the ever-liberal friends of the poet, the
Longmans, for the Memoirs and Journal edited by Lord John, now Earl,
Russell,--a lord whom the poet dearly loved.

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