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; and it is easy enough to understand why the precocious imp of a boy found favour with this distinguished person and her guests. He had all the gifts of an actor and a mimic, and they were encouraged in him first at home, and then at the boarding-school to which he was sent. Samuel Whyte, its head master, had been the teacher of Sheridan, and though he discovered none of Sheridan's abilities, the connection with the Sheridan family, added to his own tastes, had brought him into close touch with the stage. He was the author of a didactic poem on
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The Theatre, a great director of private theatricals, and a teacher of elocution. Such a man was not likely to neglect the gifts of the clever small boy entrusted to him, and Master Moore, at the age of eleven, already figured on the playbill of some important private theatricals as reciting the Epilogue. He was encouraged also in the habit of rhyming, a habit that reached back as far as he could remember; and before his fifteenth year was far gone, he attained to the honours of print in a creditable magazine, the _Anthologia Hibernica_. The first of his contributions was an amatory address to a Miss Hannah Byrne, herself, it appears, a poetess. The lines,
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To Zelia on her charging the Author with writing too much on love, need not be quoted (though the subject is characteristic), nor the
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Pastoral Ballad