That was written in March, after the escape from Elba. A month after Waterloo, Moore put sharply enough, to the same correspondent, his detestation for the Bourbons, and his general dissent from Lady Donegal's Toryism. But, although written from Ireland, the letter expresses the sentiments rather of an English Whig than an Irish Nationalist:--
"Reprobate as I am, I am sure you will give credit to my prudence and good taste in declining the grand public dinner that was about to be given me upon my arrival in Dublin. I found there were, too many of your favourites, the Catholic orators, at the bottom of the design--that the fountain of honour was too much of a _holywater_ fount for me to dabble in it with either safety or pleasure; and though I should have liked mightily the opportunity of making a treasonable speech or two after dinner, I thought the wisest thing I could do was to decline the honour. Being thus disappointed in me, they have given a grand public dinner to an eminent toll-gatherer, whose patriotic and _elegant_ method of collecting the tolls entitles him, I have no doubt, to the glory of such a celebration. Alas! alas! it must be confessed that our poor country altogether is a most wretched concern; and as for the Catholics (as I have just said in a letter written within these five minutes), one would heartily wish them all in their own Purgatory, if it were not for their adversaries, whom one wishes _still further_."
Following that is a letter to Rogers, in which Moore writes of a visit to the "foggy, boggy regions of Tipperary."
"The only thing," he goes on, "I could match you[2] in, is _banditti_; and if you can imagine groups of ragged Shanavests (as they are called) going about in noonday, armed and painted over like Catabaw Indians, to murder tithe-proctors, land-valuers, etc., you have the most stimulant specimen of the sublime that Tipperary affords. The country, indeed, is in a frightful state, and rational remedies have been delayed so long that nothing but the sword will answer now."
Very similar views would have been expressed by any member of the Whig aristocracy, whose detestation of the Holy Alliance would certainly have extended itself to the Holy Water fount, and who would have shared Moore's fastidious dislike of O'Connell's method of raising party funds. It must, however, be remembered that these passages represent Moore's immature opinions; and against the description of the Shanavests as murderous savages must be set the _Memoirs of Captain Rock_, which give the natural history of agrarian crime, denouncing, not the Shanavests or Whiteboys, but the circumstances which bred such crime, as naturally and as regularly as filth breeds fever. For Moore wrote _Captain Rock_ after reading Irish history and making something of an exhaustive tour through the south of Ireland, while in 1815 his sense of Irish grievances was largely theoretical. "I love Ireland," he wrote to his friend Corry, "but I hate Dublin"; and it is not very cynical to say that when he wrote this, Dublin was all he knew of Ireland. The influence of his early association with Emmet and others, renewed periodically by his visits to his home, was mainly an affair of sentiment, and spent itself during his long sojourn away from contact with Irish minds. It revived in him later, and it was nourished, by reading Irish history, into a steady conviction. But the first impulse that revived in Moore the enthusiasm for his own country was, I think, gratitude for its recognition of his services; and one may not unfairly trace something of his temporary alienation, if not from Ireland, at least from Irish Nationalists, to his feeling that his merits were not adequately valued among his own people. When he is blaspheming against the "low, illiberal, puddle-headed, and gross-hearted herd of Dublin," it is because his _Melologue_ "never drew a soul to the theatres in Dublin."