Excerpt from The Book of Irish Poetry Thomas Moore was more individual as a poet than any of the Young Ireland group yet, whilst he undoubtedly possessed the Irish characteristics of wit and fancy, sentiment and satire, he had nothing of the spirit of the Irish countryside in his composition. Irish was not spoken by his parents or neighbours in Dublin, and when years afterwards he was seeking materials for his History of Ireland in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, he was amazed to find what a great body of Gaelic literature in prose and verse, utterly new to him, lay collected there before his eyes. The classics inspired the anacreontics of Thomas Little his poetical tales, coloured though they were by his Celtic imagination as well as by his West Indian recollections, were entirely derived from Eastern, never from Irish sources. The only purely Irish influence upon his work was that of Irish music, and that influence has made his Irish melodies, in part at any rate, imperish able. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.