James Power of London and William Power of Dublin published the separate numbers of Moore's Selection from Irish Melodies (which compose the first edition of his famous and popular work known as Moore's Irish Melodies). Publication: no. 1-2 (1808), 3 (1810), 4 (1811), 5 (1813), 6 (1815), 7 (1818), 8 (1821), 9 (1824), 10 & supp (1834). (New CBEL; see also Muir's article in Colophon 15 1933.) The melodies were ethnic; the words were by Moore; the musical treatments were largely by Sir John Stevenson, 1760?-1833. Several groups of several issues of these numbers are in the O'Hegarty acquisition.

James Power died in 1836, leaving to his widow some 1200 letters written to him by Moore. Moore, senile for some years, died in 1852; Lord John Russell produced an ill-edited "Memoirs" of Moore which contained 400 letters, of which 57 were from the Power group; the Memoirs was published 1853-1856. Mrs Power died in 1850, and the bookdealers Puttick and Simpson sold off the Power letters on 23-24 June 1853. In 1854 an amplification of Puttick and Simpson's catalogue was published in New York (as "Letters of Thomas Moore" or "Notes from the letters of Thomas Moore to...James Power..."); this work calls Russell's editing and the circumstances of the sale into question, and apparently had been suppressed in England. (I have taken this data from the 1854 "Letters" (C2583; O'Hegarty C1061), despite the editor's bias.)

Presumably, then, O'Hegarty picked item 3 up as a stray, and it has no real connection with the book in which it was found. Items 2-5 each show signs of having been mounted in different albums; items 1 and 3 have presumably been through the Puttick sale.