Society, and afterwards the more important Historical Society; and he
published _An Ode on Nothing, with Notes, by Trismegistus Rustifucius, D.
D._, which won a party success. About the same time he wrote articles for
_The Press_, a paper founded towards the end of 1797 by O'Connor, Addis,
Emmet, and others. He graduated at Trinity College in November, 1799.

The bar was the career which his parents, and especially his mother,
wished Thomas to pursue; neither of them had much faith in poetry or
literature as a resource for his subsistence. Accordingly, in 1799, he
crossed over into England, and studied in the Middle Temple; and he was
afterwards called to the bar, but literary pursuits withheld him from
practicing. He had brought with him from Ireland his translations from
Anacreon; and published these by subscription in 1800, dedicated to the
Prince Regent (then the illusory hope of political reformers), with no
inconsiderable success. Lord Moira, Lady Donegal, and other leaders of
fashionable society, took him up with friendly warmth, and he soon found
himself a well-accepted guest in the highest circles in London. No clever
young fellow--without any advantage of birth or of person, and with
intellectual attractions which seem to posterity to be of a rather
middling kind--ever won his way more easily or more cheaply into that
paradise of mean ambitions, the _beau monde_. Moore has not escaped
the stigma which attaches to almost all men who thus succeeded under the
like conditions--that of tuft-hunting and lowering compliances. He would
be a bold man who should affirm that there was absolutely no sort of
ground for the charge; or that Moore--feted at Holland House, and
hovered-round by the fashionable of both sexes, the men picking up his
witticisms, and the women languishing over his songs--was capable of the
same sturdy self-reliance and simple adhesion to principle which might
possibly have been in him, and forthcoming from him, under different
conditions. Who shall touch pitch and not be defiled,--who treacle, and