simplicity. Such a quality, however, was not in Moore's line; and nothing
perhaps shows the essential smallness of his nature more clearly than the
fact that his visit to the United States, in their giant infancy, produced
in him no glow of admiration or aspiration, but only a recrudescence of
the commonest prejudices--the itch for picking little holes, the petty joy
of reporting them, and the puny self-pluming upon fancied or factitious
superiorities. If the washy liberal patriotism of Moore's very early years
had any vitality at all, such as would have qualified it for a harder
struggle than jeering at the Holy Alliance, and singing after-dinner songs
of national sentimentalism to the applause of Whig lords and ladies, this
American experience may beheld to have been its death-blow. He now saw
republicans face to face; and found that they were not for him, nor he for
them. He returned to England in 1806; and soon afterwards published his
_Odes and Epistles_, comprising many remarks, faithfully expressive of his
perceptions, on American society and manners.

The volume was tartly criticised in the _Edinburgh Review_ by Jeffrey, who
made some rather severe comments upon the improprieties chargeable to
Moore's early writings. The consequence was a challenge, and what would
have been a duel at Chalk Farm, but for unloaded pistols and police
interference. This _fiasco_ soon led to an amicable understanding between
Moore and Jeffrey; and a few years later, about the end of 1811, to a
friendship of closer intimacy between the Irish songster and his great
poetic contemporary Lord Byron. His lordship, in his youthful satire of
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, had made fun of the unbloody duel.
This Moore resented, not so much as a mere matter of ridicule as because
it involved an ignoring or a denial of a counter-statement of the matter
put into print by himself. He accordingly wrote a letter to Byron on the
1st of January 1810, calculated to lead to further hostilities. But, as
the noble poet had then already for some months left England for his