NEW YORK [Reuters] - It may smack of a a Scrooge-like conspiracy, but doubt has been cast this Yuletide season as to whether Clement Clarke Moore was the author of one of the world's most masterly pieces of Christmas poetry -- "A Visit From St. Nicholas," also known as "The Night Before Christmas."

Legend has it that Moore, a scholarly professor of Biblical learning, wrote that the 56 lines of the delightful bit of doggerel on a snowy Christmas eve in 1822 for the entertainment of his five young children.

The poem provided millions of youngsters with the first definitive description of what St. Nicholas [or Santa Claus or Kris Kringle or Father Christmas] looked like.

In Moore's eyes, Santa was a jolly old elf, with twinkling eyes, rosy cheeks, and a cherry-like nose, laden down with a sack of toys and making his rounds in a sliegh drawn by eight tiny reindeer.

WHILE THE IMAGERY is correct, the source is not, according to W. Stephen Thomas, director-emeritus of the Rochester Museum.

"The evidence strongly suggests that Clement Moore did not write the poem but that Maj. Henry Livingston did." Thomas said in an interview.

Henry Livingston? Livingston was a poet, gentleman farmer, musician and army major who, says Thomas -- a direct descendant -- appears to have written the famed poem, although he never took credit for it. A number of scholars agree with Thomas.

Through the years Livingston's descendants have tried, unsuccessfully, to convince literary historians that he and not Moore wrote "A Visit From St. Nicholas."

THOMAS has a letter written by one of Livingston's daughters, Eliza, in which she said her father had written and then recited the verse to his children long before it appeared under Moore's name.

In the letter Miss Livingston said two of her brothers had copies of the manuscript. One of the brothers, Sidney, was quoted by his son in the 1940's as having said he recalled his father, the Major, reciting the poem in 1804 when Sidney was eight years old.

Thomas said that most literary historians agree that the poem first appeared anonymously in a Troy, N.Y. newspaper in 1823.

"However, descendants of the Livingston family have offered testimony the poem was published years before in a Poughkeepsie [New York] paper to which Livingston had contributed poems.

"Unfortunately, there is no known record of that particular edition," Thomas said.

THOMAS SAID A STUDY of the styles of Livingston and Moore supports the belief that Livingston wrote the poem.

"The meter, the figures of speech, and the difference in personalities of the two men strongly indicate that Moore could not have written the poem," he said.

Moore was a heavy-handed writer who did not have a lyrical touch. Livingston, on the toher hand, was an expert in light verse."

Support for the debunking of Moore as the author of the children's classic also has come from literary historians Helen Wilkinson Reynolds and Henry Noble McCracken, the late president of Vassar College.

Mrs. Reynolds -- who analyzed a small volume of verse in which Moore incorporated for the first time "A Visit from St. Nicholas" -- once wrote: "The spirit and the style [of the Chrismas poem] are totally unlike Dr. Moore's usual habit of thought and manner of writing and totally unlike anything else in the book."

McCracken went even further. In his book, "Blithe Dutchess," [about Duchess County, N.Y., where Livingston lived] he wrote: "There runs through all Professor Moore's verse a kind of frustration... he was a self-torturing xx: all around him wa a rich harvest of poetry which he turned to lead."