By the time Henry O’Brien's The Round Towers appeared in 1834, Thomas Moore (1779– 1852), who participated in the public pillorying of O’Brien, was awaiting the publica-tion of the first volume of his The History of Ireland, which offered an alternative oriental account of Irish origins. Appearing in 1835, this first volume of what became a four- volume history of Ireland from the earliest times until the middle of the seventeenth cen-tury covered the period up to the Norse invasions (beginning in the late eighth century). As already noted in the previous chapter, Moore's book too was destined to be assailed by George Petrie for its particular theory of the Round Towers. At the time of the publication of The History of Ireland, Moore was already a distinguished Romantic poet and dramatist, the pre-eminent Irish nationalist balladeer, an indefatigable champion of Catholic rights in the United Kingdom, and a supporter of the campaign to repeal the 1801 Act of Union. The Dublin-born Moore, who spent most of his life in England, continued to be regarded as “The National Bard of Ireland” in most Irish nationalist quarters even after the emergence of the Young Ireland literary circle in 1842 with its new divergent patterns of nationalist poetic sensibility. The Young Ireland poet Michael Joseph Barry dedicated his 1845 edited volume of nationalist poetry to Moore, with the collection containing some of Moore's own works. The poet and a founding member of Young Ireland, Thomas Osborne Davis (d. 1845), who was originally to have edited the aforementioned collection of nationalist poems, hailed Moore “as our greatest poet.” Davis, who was otherwise critical of Moore's grandiloquent style, wrote of Moore in the Young Ireland mouthpiece The Nation (Dublin):