stanza, which she handled with great power, freedom, and melody. Psyche, which first appeared in 1795, had a wonderful vogue, running rapidly through edition after edition.  Among others to whom it appealed and who were influenced by it was Keats.  Mrs. Tighe’s talent drew from Moore a delicate compliment in “Tell me the witching tale again”; and in “The Grave of a Poetess” and “I stood where the life of song lay low”, Mrs. Hemans bewailed her untimely death.

Edmund Malone (1741-1813), the son of an Irish judge, was born in Dublin and studied at Trinity College.  He was called to the Irish bar in 1767, but coming into a fortune, he abandoned his profession and gave himself over to literary work.  In 1790 he brought out an edition of Shakespeare which was deservedly praised for its learning and research.  His critical acumen led him to doubt the genuineness of Chatterton’s Rowley Poems, and he was one of the first to expose Ireland’s Shakespearean forgeries in 1796.  Among other services to literature he wrote a Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds and edited Dryden.  He also left a quantity of materials afterwards utilized for the “Variorum Shakespeare” by James Boswell the younger in 1821.

John O’Keeffe (1747-1833), a Dublin man, was at first an art student, but soon became an actor, and then developed into a playwright.  His pen was most prolific; he published a collection of over fifty pieces in 1798.  His plays are mostly comic operas or farces, and some of them had great success.  Lingo, the schoolmaster in The Agreeable Surprise, is a very amusing character. The Positive Man, The Son-in-Law, Wild Oats, Love in a Camp, and The Poor Soldier are among his compositions.  His songs are well known, such as “I am a friar of orders grey”, and there are few schoolboys who have not sooner or later made the acquaintance of his “Amo, amas, I loved a lass”.  For the last fifty-two years of his life O’Keeffe was blind, an affliction which he bore with unfailing cheerfulness.  In 1826 he was given a pension of one hundred guineas a year from the king’s privy purse.

George Canning (1770-1827), prime minister of England, properly belongs here, for, although born in London, he was a member of an Irish family long settled at Garvagh in Co.  Derry.  Entering parliament on the side of Pitt in 1796, he was made secretary of the navy in 1804 and in 1812 secretary of State for foreign affairs.  He became prime minister in 1827, but died within six months, leaving a record for scarcely surpassed eloquence.  In addition to his speeches, he is known in literature for his contributions to the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, which ran its satirical and energetic career for eight months (November, 1797-July, 1798.) Some of the best things that appeared in this ultra-conservative organ were from Canning’s pen.  Few there are who have not laughed at his Loves of the Triangles, in which he caricatured Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants; at The Needy Knife-Grinder; or at the song of Rogero in The Rovers, with its comic refrain of the