Moore, Sir John Henry

(1756-1780)

   Born in Jamaica, the son of Sir Henry Moore, he succeeded to the title in 1769 while still at Eton. He graduated M.A. from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1776. Moore spent much of his time at Bath, Somerset, and died unmarried at Taplow, Buckinghamshire, when the title became extinct. His first volume of poetry, The New Paradise of Dainty Devices (1777), published anonymously, was sneered at in the Critical Review (43, 233). Moore retaliates in the poem "Palinode to the Reviewers." His book was reissued in 1778 as Poetical Trifles, and a third edition appeared in 1783, edited by his friend Edward Jerningham (see entry). His poem "Elegy Written in a College Library" is a parody of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" and "Hastings" commemorates the famous battle of 1066. Some of his other poems: "Absence, An Elegy," "Indeed, My Caelia, 'Tis in Vain," "The Chelsea Pensioner," "The Cock and the Horses, A Fable," "The Duke of Benevento."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse. David Nichol Smith, ed. Oxford University Press, 1926.