The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born at Dublin, 1780. Died in Wiltshire, 1852. Aged 72.] A poet of exuberant fancy, revelling in lavish ornament and gorgeous painting, and giving utterance to the most ingenious creations, in language of ineffable, and, occasionally, overpowering sweetness. A writer of inimitable Irish ballads, which are now plaintive, now joyous, now pathetic, now fervid, now tender, now fierce, now melting, now heroic; but always matchless by the graceful flow of the verse, and the prompt springing of the happiest illustration. Also the author of satires, brilliant and cutting, but rather the outpourings of a generous fancy, delighting in its own exquisite self-conscious faculty of mischief, than the malicious and bitter expression of a vexed and disappointed mind. Melody and joyance are careering in almost every syllable that he wrote. He was a passionate lover of music, and when he sang his own ballads, the effect upon his listeners was electrical. His most celebrated poetical composition is “Lalla Rookh,” an Eastern romance, which he wrote “amidst the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters.” His best prose work, “The Epicurean,” is a masterly performance, redolent of the perfume which breathes through his verse, and elevated by a high moral aim. When Thomas Moore died, the impression left of the man upon the public mind was stamped there by his jocund muse--a feeling of tenderness and love was associated with the pleasant memory of “Little Tommy Moore.” Since his death his memoirs and his diary have been published, and the impression has grown dimmer and dimmer in consequence. As a man, Thomas Moore, the poet, appears to have been hardly more heroic than the most prosaic of his kind. [By Christopher Moore. Executed in 1838, for the late Edward Moore, of Mayfair.]