Although he came to be regarded as the national lyricist of Ireland, Thomas Moore was also a musician, novelist, satirist, historian, and the biographer of Richard Brinsley Sheridan; George Gordon, Lord Byron; and the Irish revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald. He was born on 28 May 1779 in Dublin. His mother, Anastasia Codd Moore, was a devout Catholic, an ambitious woman, and had an interest in the arts. His father, John Moore, from Kerry, was a wine grocer with a quiet sense of humor and was decidedly less religiously inclined than his wife. Catholic births were not registered, owing to the power of the Protestant Anglo-Irish minority, but Moore's mother had a one-crown coin cast to commemorate the date. (The coin is in the British Museum in London.)

Most of the Irish at the time were tenant farmers, almost all of whom were Catholics forced, despite considerable hardship, to pay tithes...