Moore was a man of no particular nicety as to moralities, but in that matter seems not very much below what this record shows his average associates to be.  He is so far superior to Maginn, that his vice is rose-coloured and refined.  He does not burst out with such heroic stanzas as Maginn’s frank invitation to Jeremy Bentham:—­

   ’Jeremy, throw your pen aside,
      And come get drunk with me;
   And we’ll go where Bacchus sits astride,
      Perched high on barrels three.’

Moore’s vice is cautious, soft, seductive, slippery, and covered at times with a thin, tremulous veil of religious sentimentalism.

In regard to Byron, he was an unscrupulous, committed partisan:  he was as much bewitched by him as ever man has been by woman; and therefore to him, at last, the task of editing Byron’s ‘Memoirs’ was given.

This Byron, whom they all knew to be obscene beyond what even their most drunken tolerance could at first endure; this man, whose foul license spoke out what most men conceal from mere respect to the decent instincts of humanity; whose ’honour was lost,’—­was submitted to this careful manipulator, to be turned out a perfected idol for a world longing for an idol, as the Israelites longed for the calf in Horeb.

The image was to be invested with deceitful glories and shifting haloes,—­admitted faults spoken of as peculiarities of sacred origin,—­and the world given to understand that no common rule or measure could apply to such an undoubtedly divine production; and so the hearts of men were to be wrung with pity for his sorrows as the yearning pain of a god, and with anger at his injuries as sacrilege on the sacredness of genius, till they were ready to cast themselves at his feet, and adore.

Then he was to be set up on a pedestal, like Nebuchadnezzar’s image on the plains of Dura; and what time the world heard the sound of cornet, sackbut, and dulcimer, in his enchanting verse, they were to fall down and worship.

For Lady Byron, Moore had simply the respect that a commoner has for a lady of rank, and a good deal of the feeling that seems to underlie all English literature,—­that it is no matter what becomes of the woman when the man’s story is to be told.  But, with all his faults, Moore was not a cruel man; and we cannot conceive such outrageous cruelty and ungentlemanly indelicacy towards an unoffending woman, as he shows in these ‘Memoirs,’ without referring them to Lord Byron’s own influence in making him an unscrupulous, committed partisan on his side.

So little pity, so little sympathy, did he suppose Lady Byron to be worthy of, that he laid before her, in the sight of all the world, selections from her husband’s letters and journals, in which the privacies of her courtship and married life were jested upon with a vulgar levity; letters filled, from the time of the act of separation, with a constant succession of sarcasms, stabs, stings, epigrams, and vindictive