The following year Moore accompanied Lord John Russell on a continental tour, taking the road of the Simplon to Italy. Lord John went on to Genoa, and Moore directed his steps toward Venice, for the purpose of seeing Byron. It was during this visit the noble lord made Moore a present of his personal memoirs, for publication after the writer's death. Moore gives the following account of the transaction: "We were conversing together when Byron rose and went out. In a minute or two he returned carrying a white leathern bag. 'Look here!' he said, holding it up, 'this would be worth something to Murray, though you, I daresay, would not give sixpence for it.' 'What is it?' I asked, 'My life and adventures,' he answered. On hearing this I raised my hands in a gesture. 'It is not a thing that can be published during my life, but you may have it if you like: then do whatever you please with it.' In taking the bag, and thanking him most warmly, I added: 'This will make a nice legacy for my little Tom, who shall astonish the latter end of the nineteenth century with it.' He then added: 'You may show it to any of your friends you think worthy of it.' This is as nearly as I can recollect all that passed." These memoirs Moore sold to Murray for two thousand guineas, but at Lord Byron's death, his executors and family induced Moore to repay Mr. Murray and destroy the manuscript. The precise reasons which decided Moore to yield to the solicitations of the deceased lord's friends and family are not known, but there can be little doubt that they were urgent, and in a moral sense irresistible. A man does not usually throw away two thousand guineas for a caprice, even of his own, much less for that of others. It is not likely that the world has lost much by the destruction of these memoirs. Lord Byron's life is sufficiently written in his published works for all purposes save that of the gratification of a morbid curiosity and vulgar appetite for scandal.
During the journey to and from Italy, Moore sketched the "Rhymes on the Road," which were soon afterward published. There is nothing remarkable about them except his abuse of Rousseau and Madame Warens, _à propos_ of a visit to Les Charmettes. Moore was violently assailed for this by writers, who held that as he had himself translated Anacreon, and written juvenile songs of an immoral tendency, he was thereby incapacitated from fy, fying naughty people in his maturer and better years. This seems hardly a reasonable maxim, and would, if strictly interpreted and enforced, silence much grave and learned eloquence, oral as well as written. His denunciations of the eccentric and fanciful author of the "Confessions," which twenty years before he would probably have called the enunciations of "Virtue with her zone loosened;" were certainly violent and unmeasured, and not, perhaps, in the very best taste.
