Moore himself--except during his stay in Paris, when much adulation led him to question whether he might not perhaps really deserve to rank with Scott and Byron--always regarded his poetry as unlikely to last. His modesty was real; for not only did he feel himself overshadowed by Scott and Byron, but, placed in the difficult position of knowing himself popular and Wordsworth all but unread, he never hesitated in recognising Wordsworth's as by far the greater talent. His growing admiration for this poet is all the more remarkable, because at many meetings his sense of ridicule was frequently stimulated by Wordsworth's egotism and "soliloquacious" habit of conversation. Coleridge he could neither like nor understand, and it seems that he did not care much for Shelley. But throughout his Diary, one finds him manifesting, in many passages, the conviction that these men, the unread, were better artists than himself; and he notes with exceptional pleasure any word of praise from them, as if he expected only dislike and disapprobation for his facile and popular verses. Not less should it be noted, that none of them praised his longer poems, but all (except of course Wordsworth) spoke with sincere enthusiasm of his lyrics. The opinion of Landor and of Shelley was, in effect, that expressed by Moore himself: that of his whole work the _Irish Melodies_ alone were likely to last into future times. But both Shelley (as reported by his wife) and Landor agreed in attributing to Moore's lyrics the highest poetical merit. How far critical opinion may ultimately bear out this estimate must remain to be seen; but probably the depreciation of Moore's work, which prevails at present, is hardly more judicious than Lord John Russell's extravagant over-praise.
The last century has been one of increasing virtuosity in the management of lyric metres. From Cowper and Crabbe to Mr. Swinburne, is a strange distance; and it has not been sufficiently realised that Moore is very largely responsible for the advance. Many critics have noted the change from the strictly syllabic scansion of Pope's school to metres like those of Tennyson's _Maud_, and a hundred later poems, in which syllabic measurement is wholly discarded. It has been noted also that, even in the freer metres of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lyric writers confined themselves to variations of the trochee or iambic, and that an anapæstic or dactylic measure is hardly found before Waller. But it has hardly been recognised that till Moore began to use these triple feet, no poet used them with dexterity and confidence.