Moore, Thomas, the national poet of Ireland, was born in 1799 in Dublin, where his father was a grocer; died near Devizes in 1852. From Trinity College, Dublin, he passed in 1799 to the Middle Temple in London, nominally to study law; but he almost immediately formed a connection with the fashionable and literary society of which he was so long an ornament, and in 1800 he was permitted to dedicate his Translation of the Odes of anacreon to the Prince of Wales. - Winston's Encyclopedia, 1919