Of all the impudent productions that have ever been intruded on the patience of the public, we believe that none has ever yet appeared, which if it approximated, has exceeded "the travels of an Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion," from the pen of Mr. Thomas Moore.

When that gentleman confined his lucubrations to the Philosophy of Greece -the Paganism of Persia, or the Profligacy of all the ancient and modern world-nay, when he extended the range of his imagination beyond the circumference of this little globe, to speed the flights of his follies and his loves, even on the wings of angelshowever we may have mourned over the wanderings of desecrated genius or perverted talents, still there were paths of literary delinquency into which his footsteps had not seemed to stray-but Moore, in this his last production, has filled up the measure of his iniquities as an author. He spent the talent of his youth in effusions calculated to debauch and to destroy the human soul; and now he has employed the labours of his declining years in attempting to pour the poison of infidelity and superstition, into the only fountain of mercy, that heaven has given to redeem and save it for it shall clearly appear in the examination of his work, that whatever religion he may have gone in search of, it is not that which God has revealed to man in his Sacred Word, but that the whole intent and effect of his book is to press into his service all the powers of Infidelity and Superstition, to decry and to put down that Sacred Truth which is the object, alike, of abhorrence and terror to them both.

As to the former productions of Mr. Moore, (while we shall have occasion to advert to them in the course of our observations on the work before us, as

throwing not a little light on the genius of that superstition which he has so unintentionally but so effectively exhibited), we think it of high importance to consider them in a general point of view, in reference to the author himself as coming forward now, in the character of a theologian and a censor, to hold up before the nation the authoritative demands of his own religion on their obedience and subjection, and to consign most deliberately and systematically, to damnation, as he does all those who refuse to submit their understandings and consciences to his dictation.

When such startling demands and denunciations are announced, we naturally ask-" who is this author?what is his religion?-on what authority does he come forward?-what are his claims on our attention ?---what propagator of a new religion, or what vindicator of an old one is this, who rises ex cathedrà before the public, and demands a nation's ears, if not with the inspiration, at least with the assumed authority of an Apostle? When such questions as these are asked, in referrence to Mr. Moore, it would be considered, perhaps, invidious to propose them either to a stern moralist, to a severe divine, or even to a political opponent of that gentleman-but surely he will have no reason to be displeased with us, if we derive our answer from an authority, not remarkable either for the severity of his morals, or the rigidity of his theology, and so far from a political opponent, a fellow-labourer with our author, in the most fertile fields of agitation and sedition, and, moreover, a most devoted admirer and panegyrist of his talents, as a patriot and a poet. From this partial judge of our author, we extract the following quotations, as furnishing a fair reply to our questions :

OLD PLAY.

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"All hail, thou veriest disciple in "the namby pamby temple of the Mu"ses! Thou worshipper at the tesse"lated shrine of happy conceits and sugar plums. Thou explorer of the empyreum of unholy bliss-thou high "priest in the sensual temple of the Cyprian Queen-thou wholesale ma"nufacturer of luxurious couplets— "thou inexhaustible fund of kisses, "glances, squeezings, cupids and darts "-thou commentator on the vocabu"lary of love-thou 'wizard of the "Teian lyre'-thou organizer of sys"tematic match-making- thou master "of the lights and shadows of love"thou prism of poetry, taking thy co"lours from all the rich and beautiful "things in nature-thou spiteful un"veiler of fashionable follies-thou "prince of the boudoir-thou elegant sympathizer with maidens in their "teens-thou monarch of all that is lovely, adorable, luxurious and de"lightful-Hail!"

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This devoted admirer of Mr. Moore, proceeds to give us a sketch of his productions, and we should wrong his friendship and admiration, were we not to give it in his own language.

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arising out of a pun passed upon him by some of his college associates."At the same time that we fault these 66 poems in a moral view, it is impossi"ble to deny that they contain many "strokes of happy gallantry, and many "indications of the author's peculiar 66 powers. Virtue, modesty, and morality, uplift their voices against these lux"urious effusions; yet so charmingly "are they written, that the offended "Muses, while they vindicate their chastity from the insult thus offered "to it, cannot refuse a portion of Apol"lo's bays, and ultimately a cheering "smile dissipates the angry frown, as they bid their favourite go and sin "no more."

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"ons glow supinely at his eloquent and furtive reminiscences. How far virtue "and morality are injured by such publications it is not necessary to enquire, but with the following propo"sition I believe the majority of "well organized minds will agree.— "Vice open and exposed displaying its "most hideous contortions, carries on its front the talisman of salvation, we are disgusted with its horrors, and by them we are warned from its effects; but "how sadly different is it with that_elegant libertinism of which Mr. Moore was the eloquent and redoubtable champion-it is the serpent under the "flower-it comes around us in seductive "shapes of beauty-its intoxicating "charms seize upon our feelings-the magic of its luxuriance makes slaves of our sympathies, and ere we are aware "that the painted chalice which it com"mends to our lips contains the worst of "poisons, we are led captive by its

pleasing allurements and prostrated to "its profligate influence. As an illus "tration of the foregoing, I may en "passant quote the following from his "Anacreon: The picture here has all "the delicate character of the semire"ducta Venus; and is the sweetest em"blem of what the poetry of passion ought to be; glowing, but through a veil, and stealing upon the heart from concealment.' This is the very essence of that refined delicacy and "voluptuous sentiment in which the "French Romanciers excel, mingling "the indelicacy of Voiture with the elegance of St. Evremond."

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There are occasions on which the sentiments of moral truth and justice come home with a force and power to the heart greater than ever the authority of an apostle could confer, and that is when they are extorted from the very lips of vice-the application of this principle could not be more signally illustrated, than by the fact, that these reflections upon Moore are taken from the Editor of the Comet, in the Number of Feb. 24th, 1833-perhaps at that very moment, Moore had just returned from his " Travels," and I believe it will be granted on this evidence of his admirer and his friend, that no little gentleman ever set out on an expedition in quest of a religion, who appeared more deplorably in want of that commodity.

The latter effusions of this writer

may not seem to have violated so grossly the rules of morality, but no man will pretend to say that they have indicated any progress in the acquisition of religion, and in our judgment, the latest and most popular of his productions in prose, before he favoured the world with this edition of his“ Travels" is scarcely less objectionable, in a religious and moral point of view, than the earliest exhibitions of his licentiousness in poetry-we allude to his Life of Lord Byron.

Feeling in common with the public of the United Kingdom, an interest in the remains of an author of the splendid genius of Lord Byron, we can make every allowance for the curiosity that would enquire into the most minute details of his private feelings and domestic lifebut we can make little for the bookmaking cupidity which would convince them, at the expense of betraying all the unsuspecting confidence of a departed and unfortunate friend.

A warm admiration of his poetical, musical, and convivial talents, had given to Moore the unreserved and thoughtless friendship of Lord Byron, and in the fullness of his heart, he flung his thoughts, his feelings, and his adventures, just as they occurred to him, into the letters transmitted to his friend. Little did he dream, that instead of being committed to the flames, they were to be treasured up with all the treachery of an avaricious authorship, to rise in judgment against his memory-little did he imagine that ere his ashes were cold in the grave, the follies and the profligacies of the husband and the father, were to inflict, from the pen of his friend, innumerable pangs upon the bosom of the wife, the mother, and the daughter, while the pressure on his memory and on their hearts was to be counterpoised by the price of two ponderous quartos, paid into the pocket of his friend and biographer! True friendship would have wept-religion would have drawn a veil over countless pages of their contents-but the tears of Popish friendship are easily exhaled in the purlieus of Paternoster-row and Ave Maria-lane, and as to religion, Tommy, perhaps, had only then set out upon his travels in quest of it.

The letters which he has published, as addressed by Lord Byron to himself, furnish no very difficult clue to

the tenor of his own correspondence in reply, and both afford a useful, but melancholy comment on the prac tical effects of Infidelity and Superstition in these two poets. In his early productions, Moore afforded a painful specimen of the one, in the theoretical profligacy of his own mind, and in this publication he has given a lamentable exhibition of the other, in the reduction of his theory to practice by his friend.

These are the characteristic pretensions of an author, who now presents himself to the public as the grave, the learned, the inflexible vindicator of a religion; and it must, no doubt, afford considerable weight to the denunciations which he heaps, without regard to creeds, principles, or morals, on all who do not submit to the religion which he recommends; that it is the very same which has produced such a precious specimen of its instruction as the author, being that in which he has been most strictly educated himself, and which he now professes to have brought home from his travels, laden with all the spoils of antiquity to enlighten and regenerate the world.

The plan of his book is simply as follows:

He sets out with representing himself as having been most anxious to become a Protestant, from a motive to which he attempts to give an interest, by concealing it until the commencement of his second volume. This motive turns out to be that an elderly maiden-lady, who had a presentation to a rich living in her power, fell in love with the little gentleman, and contrived to cultivate his affection, under the pretext of endeavouring to convert him; this furnishes him with a happy opportunity of turning into ridicule the efforts of ladies to convey scriptural instruction, which he accomplishes through the medium of two very witty alliterations, namely," Scene in a Shrubbery," and "Cupid and Calvin," together with as blasphemous a string of quotations from the Scriptures, as any champion of Popery and profligacy could desire; the ambition of possessing the old lady and the fat living induces him to set out, as he calls it, on his "travels in search of the Protestant religion," that he might, if possible, reconcile it to his conscience to embrace

both it and its appendages. Accordingly he sets out to travel through the Fathers of the first four centuries to search for this desirable object; but in searching for Protestantism, the disconsolate traveller finds nothing but Popery-genuine Popery-pure as it is to be found in the attic story of Braganza House, where the apostolic J. K. L. nightly retires to repeat his offices, so that as the author himself so happily expresses it, "if St. Basil, St. "Ambrose, and a few more such flow"ers of the churches had been able to "borrow the magic nightcaps of their " contemporaries the seven sleepers, "and were now, after a nap of about fifteen centuries, just opening their eyes in the town of Carlow, they "would find in the person of Dr. Doyle, the learned bishop of Leighlin "and Ferns, not only an Irishman "whose acquaintance even they might be proud to make, but a fellow"Catholic, every iota of whose creed "would be found to correspond ex"actly with their own."-Vol. 1, p. 71. This is excellent; we suppose it was St. Basil who praised the poor man for putting the Bible into the fire with a pair of tongs, lest they might be polluted with the touch, and St. Ambrose who circulated a paper among them, sent from the apostolic successor, in the chair of the St. Peter of his day, in which he informed them that the Bible

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was

"the Gospel of the Devil!"-(See letters of J. K. L., and the Pope's Encyclical letter of 1825.)

Having searched in vain for Protestantism among the Fathers, our traveller comes to the prudent resolution of making an excursion in quest of his qualification for the lady and the living in another direction; accordingly he sets out into the land of heresy, and traversing its population throughout all its length and breadth, from Simon Magus to Sherlock, from the inhabitants of Capernaum, (who, he informs us, were the first to question the doctrine of transubstantiation) to us poor devils by anticipation, and the Protestants of Anno Domini 1833, as he had satisfactorily ascertained that nothing but Popery was to be found among the Fathers, so he has brought home from his travels the equally satisfactory intelligence that nothing but pure Protestantism was to be discovered among the heretics, who were

the only knaves among the ancients at all addicted to the pernicious custom of reading the Bible, and maintaining that abominable principle, that man is to dare to apply his understanding to that Pantheon Phusitecnicon of evils, the word of his Creator!— Accordingly, Tommy, having introduced St. Basil and St. Ambrose, and a few more saints to that sweet-souled kindred spirit, Dr. Doyle, seizes upon Simon Magus, the Docetæ, the Ebionites, the Marcionites, and countless other multitudes of heretics whom he brings home in triumph as prisoners of war, and having tied these fellows neck and heels, along with those Bible-disseminating, church-subverting, hereticmaking traitors, Lords Roden, Lorton, and Farnham, together with all the Bishops, Rectors, Curates, and their congregations of the Established Church, he consigns them all as coolly to perdition as Nebuchadnezzar ordered his mightiest soldiers to cast the three children bound into the midst of the burning fiery furnace. Tommy not only discovers, but absolutely extinguishes the heretics-he only calls himself a traveller, because modesty forbids that he should designate himself a hero; but having completed alike his travels and his conquests, the reader, no doubt, will anticipate the catastrophe, viz. that Tommy could not reconcile it to his conscience to turn Protestant, but piously preferring penance and purgatory to the lady and the living, he ascends into the true church, which he donominates the ark, and sails away triumphantly to Heaven, and runs down bibles, ladies, livings, churches, kings, bishops, Lords, Commons, and all sorts, sizes, ranks, ages, sexes, and denominations of heretics, from the aforesaid Simon Magus, to the aforesaid Lord Farnham, with as little ceremony as a first-rate man-ofwar runs over a dead frog, and while he and the ark ride on through heretics, holy-water, and purgatory, foes, billows, and flames, to eternal glory, he leaves us all to sink as we deserve into the bottomless abyss of everlasting ruin. Even at the close of Vol. 1, he cries, "enough has been said to show "what fantastic gambols the various "and ever-teeming stream of heresy "have, at all times, played around the "venerable ark of the church, in her majestic navigation through the great

deep of ages. While in vain at"tempting to sully or perplex her path, "shoal after shoal, of these monsters, "have descended into darkness, leav"ing the one bright buoyant refuge of "the faithful to pursue unharmed, to "the end of time, her saving way."Vol. 1, p. 299. If the reader can conceive the author coming to this conconclusion, through a tedious, partial, and as we hope at another time to prove, absurd, inapplicable tissue of quotations from the Fathers-a disgusting and often blasphemous detail of stupid, most absurd, and unnatural heresies, with a continued effort to identify the former with Popery, and the latter with Protestantism, without proof of either; if he can conceive a series of perversions of one passage of Scripture, which he attempts to quote in his own favour, and impious abuses of many, when he ridicules it as quoted against him-if he can conceive all the actual faults and sins of the reformers, (and as poor frail sinners, of course, they had many) exaggerated and distorted with the most sedulous malignity, while all the lies that ever were told of them are selected and retailed; if he can conceive the violent superstitions of Popery, palliated and softened, or totally denied, or impudently vindicated, and this got up with no small care and diligence from every commonplace book of popery, and every little pamphlet and review, that the activity of a mind busied in mischief could get at, and all this for one sole purpose, to put down and trample on the Gospel of Christ, and by all the sophistries of Popery, the perversions of heresy, and the sneers of infidelity, to bring contempt on the authenticity of the bible, the reading of the bible, and the doctrines of the bible; if the reader can conceive all this, malignantly worked up into that stupid attempt of a story, of which we have just given a sketch, then he may ima gine the value of "The Travels of an Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion, with Notes, by the editor of Captain Rock's Memoirs."-With all this we pronounce this work of Thomas Moore, (and we trust to prove it a most valuable acquisition to the theology of the

VOL. II.

day)-a valuable acquisition to the Roman Catholics, and a no less valuable acquisition to the Protestants of Ireland. The more that Popery steps forth into the light of day-the more conspicuously she exhibits herself to the public gaze, the more shall we detect the abominations of that accursed superstition, and prove her to be the enemy of the human race in time and in eternity.

We rejoice that Moore has undertaken to defend her; we have caught a hold of Tommy, and we shall not let him go till we make him tell out the iniquities of his mother, the church; he has proved himself a most admirable witness; we give him all imaginable credit for the dutiful anxiety with which he has concocted his direct evidence-but since we have him on the table, we shall take the liberty of making him submit to a cross-examination.

And first, we would call the public attention to the felicitous character under which he has commenced his dedication :-" The Editor of the Memoirs of Captain Rock." This is that well known title, under which the vast mass of nocturnal crimes, that have disgraced and ruined this unfortunate country, have been perpetrated-the rights of property, even to the possession of the poorest cabin, ferociously invaded-individuals treated with savage barbarity-numbers put to the most cruel deaths-houses burned, and their inmates, men, women, and children, consumed; in short, crimes in every shape, at which humanity shudders, perpetrated without measure, mercy, or remorse. Moore sits down to write the memoirs of Captain Rock, in which he vindicates and excuses this fictitious personage, and attributes all these crimes to the just vengeance of Popery, for the existence of the Protestant religion in Ireland. One single sentiment, taken from this volume -a sentiment not the less sincere because expressed in poetry, and so congenial to Popery, that it was quoted by a Popish member of the House of Commons, since the church bill was brought in, will give within its short compass an epitome of the volume

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