deed the
"excellent and beautiful person" of Lord John's measured approval, not
so much by what she says or does as by her reactions on Tom himself.
A study of her has to be made out of a number of pencil-scratches--one
here, one there--put down by the diarist with unpremeditated art; for
it is certain that, though Moore intended his diaries to speak for him
after his death, what he had to say of his wife was the last thing
in them he would have relied upon to do it. I am sure that is so;
nevertheless, with the exception of Tom himself, who, of course, holds
the centre of the stage, she is more surely and sensibly there than
any of his thousand characters, from the Prince Regent to the poet
Bowles; more surely and fragrantly there. We are the better for her
presence; and so is her Tom's memory, infinitely the better.

It was a secret marriage and, except in the minds of a few good
judges, an improvident.

"I breakfast with Lady Donegal on Monday," he writes to his
mother in May, 1811, "and dine to meet her at Rogers' on
Tuesday; and there is to be a person at both parties whom you
little dream of."

This person was Bessy, to whom he had been married some two months
on the day of writing, and of whom, when his family was notified, he
found that it had nothing good to say. He complains of disappointment,
of a "degree of coldness" in his father's comments; and neither is
perhaps very wonderful. For Miss Bessy not only had nothing a year,
but in the reckoning of the day, and in comparison with the young
friend of Lord Moira and Lady Donegal, she herself was nothing.
She was indeed a professional actress--Miss E. Dyke in the
play-bills--whom Tom had first met in 1808 when the Kilkenny Theatre
began a meteor-course. He had lent himself as an amateur to the
enterprise, was David in _The Rivals_, Spado (with song) in _A Castle
of Andalusia_. In 1809, for three weeks on end, he had been Peeping
Tom of Coventry to the Lady Godiva of Miss E. Dyke. The rest is easy
guessing, and so it is that Tom's parents were dismayed, and that
there was a "degree of coldness." Lady Godiva, indeed!

But Bessy was not long in showing herself as good as gold, or
approving herself to some of Tom's best friends. Lady Donegal and her
sharp-tongued sister, Mary Godfrey, both took to her. "Give our
love, honest, downright love to Bessy," they write. Rogers called her
Psyche, had the pair to stay with him, stayed with them in his tur