Thomas Moore

Thomas Moore (28 May 1779 – 25 February 1852), was an Irish writer, poet and lyricist, popularly regarded in his time as his country's "national bard". It was a reputation that rested largely on his ten-volume ''Irish Melodies'' (1808-1834). Laden with themes of dispossession and loss, these set new, English-language, verse to old Irish tunes. With ''Lalla Rookh'' (1817), in which some read allusions to the rebellion of 1798, Moore achieved wider international acclaim. Translated into several languages and set to music by, among others, Robert Schumann, the oriental-themed verse-narrative established Moore as a leading exemplar of European romanticism.

In England, Moore moved in aristocratic Whig circles where, in addition to a salon performer, he was appreciated as a squib writer and master of political satire. Chief among his targets, in successive Tory governments, was Lord Castlereagh in whose promises of "emancipation" Moore believed his fellow Catholics in Ireland had been deceived. In a verse novel, ''The Fudge Family in Paris'' (1818), he pillories the Foreign Secretary for employing the same "faithless craft" used to press Ireland into a union with Great Britain to accommodate reaction and restoration in Europe.

Wary of an overtly Catholic place-seeking nationalism, Moore refused a nomination in Ireland to stand with Daniel O'Connell and his Repeal Association for the Westminster parliament. His broader sympathies were expressed in his several prose works, including a biography of the United Irish leader Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831) and the ''Memoirs of Captain Rock'' (1824) Complementing Maria Edgeworth's ''Castle Rackrent'' (1800), the satirical novel is the story, not of Anglo-Irish landowners, but of their exhausted tenants driven to the semi-insurrection of Whiteboyism.

Moore continues to be remembered chiefly for his ''Melodies'' (typically''The Minstrel Boy'' and ''The Last Rose of Summer''). He is also recalled, less generously, for the role he is thought to have played in the destruction of the memoirs of his friend, Lord Byron. Provided by Wikipedia