24G 



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 to a 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 i 

 assures his mother in one of them (and he wrote to that mother i 

 twice a week throughout his whole life) that the cordiality and 

 interest of all his friends had been increased twofold since the event, j 

 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 f 

 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 



