Thomas Moore, on his way back from a visit to his
noble friend Byron, at Venice, who had there been leading a life so gross
as to be talked about, even amid the crash of Napoleon's fall, and who
was just writing "Don Juan" for the improvement of the world,--Mr. Thomas
Moore, fresh from the reading of Byron's Memoirs, which were so
scandalous that, by some hocus-pocus, three thousand guineas afterward
found their way into his own pocket for consenting to suppress them,--Mr.
Thomas Moore, the _ci-devant_ friend of the Prince Regent, and the author
of Little's Poems, among other objects of pilgrimage visits _Les
Charmettes_, where Rousseau had lived with Madame de Warens. So good an
opportunity for occasional verses was not to be lost, so good a text for
a little virtuous moralizing not to be thrown away; and accordingly Mr.
Moore pours out several pages of octosyllabic disgust at the sensuality
of the dead man of genius. There was no horror for Byron. Toward him all
was suavity and decorous _bienseance_. That lively sense of benefits to
be received made the Irish Anacreon wink with both his little eyes. In
the judgment of a liberal like Mr. Moore, were not the errors of a lord
excusable? But with poor Rousseau the case was very different.
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