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
not be sweetened? At the same time, it is easy to carry charges of this
kind too far, and not always through motives the purest and most exalted.
It may be said without unfairness on either side that the sort of talents
which Moore possessed brought him naturally into the society which he
frequented; that very possibly the world has got quite as much out of him
by that development of his faculties as by any other which they could have
been likely to receive; and that he repaid patronage in the coin of
amusement and of bland lenitives, rather than in that of obsequious
adulation. For we are not required nor permitted to suppose that there was
the stuff of a hero in "little Tom Moore;" or that the lapdog of the
drawing-room would under any circumstances have been the wolf-hound of the
public sheepfold.
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