246 Tom Moore. 
I pass my whole time among knowing ones and blacklegs—the 
former on the library shelves, and the latter in the rookery!” In 
a few years he became engaged tou Miss Dyke, and was married 
to her in London on the 25th of March, 1811. There is a marked 
silence upon the subject in his letters of this period; albeit he 
assures his mother in one of them (and he wrote to that mother 
twice a week throughout his whole life) that the cordiality and 
interest of all his friends had been increased twofold since the event. 
As to the lady herself—“ his Bessy,” as she is henceforth called— 
one cannot imagine a more sweetly unselfish character. Most 
beautiful in person, with “a wild poetic face,’ some fourteen years 
younger than himself, she was untiring in her devotion to home, 
husband, and five children. The slight and delicate physique was un- 
sparingly exposed to every storm of life (—and theirs were many—) 
if thereby the husband might be shielded or spared pain. Her value 
was fully realized by Tom Moore, and she received from him, to the 
close of their wedded life of more than forty years, ‘‘ the homage of 
a lover.” To the very end she was his “ dear girl,” his “ darling 
Bessy.” 
Their determination to live in the country upon the earnings of 
his brains became now a fixed resolve—to use his own happy 
alliteration, they would live on “ Love, Literature, and Liberty.” 
The first married home was at Kegworth, to be within easy reach 
of Donnington Park, but he calls it “an old matter-of-fact barn, 
though frequented by ghosts [hence the report, no doubt, that 
* Lalla Rookh ” was written in a barn]: and the neighbourhood 
swarmed with Methodists and manufacturers.” 
The next move was to another haunted house, Mayfield Cottage, 
near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, within four miles of the lovely 
Dovedale. He was here closely engaged on his magnum opus, yet 
found time withal for Society, without which existence was for him 
well-nigh intolerable. Two children had been born to them, the 
eldest girl Barbara in 1812, and Olivia Byron, who died in convul- 
sions, 1815. But we hasten on to Tom Moore in Wiltshire, and 
Sloperton Cottage. 
Among a host of admiring friends none were more sincere and 
