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ing, is distinguished by sweetness and energy. She sings, both in the sportive and pathetic style, with much judgment and feeling her address is elegant, and her manners are at the same time courteous and commanding. Miss Seward's conversation is like her composition, full of fire and fancy, tempered by softness; and her society, therefore, exemplifies and illustrates

"The feast of reason, and the flow of soul."

Miss Seward has recently employed herself in writing memoirs of her departed friend the late eminent Dr. Darwin, whose admiration she possessed during life.

We will close our account of this distinguished lady with an animated sonnet she has very lately given to the public, to an amiable young writer, who is every way deserving of her praise.

SONNET,

Addressed to WM. DIMOND, Esq.

Written after perusing his "Hero of the North."

"Hail to the bard, with native genius blest,

Who breathes new impulse to our British choir,
Who roves through Fancy's maze, with soul possest,
And twines with roses the historic lyre!
Bright DIMOND! as I trace thy glowing page

Young joys awake in many a thrilling throng;

In thee the minstrels of an happier age

New voice assume, and swell their boldest song!

The Sister Muses with contending love,

Thy favor'd harp of mingled notes inspire,
And bid its sounding strings alternate move
With Otway's softness, and with Dryden's fire.
Proceed, thou gifted youth, and o'er thy way
A nation's hand shall weave its greenest bay !'"'

ANNA SEWARD.

THOMAS

THOMAS LEWIS O'BEIRNE, D. D.

BISHOP OF MEATH."

THE subject of this memoir furnishes an additional name to grace the catalogue of those truly illustrious characters, who, by their private and public virtues, have triumphed over every opposition, and raised themselves to honourable emipence in society.

The great reverse of situation which his family had experienced from one of those revolutions which so frequently affect the fortunes of nations and individuals, and of which we have had so many affecting instances in our own day, was not the only obstacle which Dr. Beirne had to surmount. Born and educated within the pale of the Roman Catholic church, he had, at first, to overcome the spirit of religious prejudice, carefully infused into a tender mind, and afterwards to contend with the force of public opinion, which is not apt to give credit to the professions of those who renounce an old, and unexpectedly embrace a new system of worship. He has, however, completely succeeded in impressing the public mind with a firm conviction of the purity of his motives; and the natural mildness of his temper, unperverted by the rancorous impulse of a new-born zeal, has excited regret, without censure, in the members of the religion that lost him, and admiration, without envy, in the reverend teachers of the faith which he now professes.

Dr. O'Beirne was born at Farnagh, in the county of Long

* We are happy in this place to have it in our power to bestow several important corrections upon the memoirs of this respectable Prelate, and are concerned to find that in the former account some inaccuracies were admitted relative to material points connected with the early part of his lordship's life and his con

nexions.

ford,

ford, in the year 1749. The O'Beirnes of Dangan, in the county of Roscommon, of whom he is now the chief, ranked from the earliest times to the period of the revolution among the most ancient and respectable of the Irish families of the province of Connaught, and were originally a branch of the O'Connors. It appears from the records of the Herald's-office in Dublin, that as early as the reign of King John, John O'Beirne, sirnamed Barnveal, or the Hairlipped, was seated at Dangan; a great favourite of the king's, and endowed with immense possessions; and on the same records is a genealogy containing a regular descent of heirs male, with their different intermarriages, from this John to Francis O'Beirne of Dangan, who at the time of the revolution forfeited the inheritance of his family for the second time, in the cause of the unfortunate Stuarts. Under Cromwell's usurpation he had attended Charles the Second through all his fortunes, and in the Act of Settlement he is restored to his estates, among those who are there enumerated as having given that proof of unshaken loyalty and attachment to the exiled monarch. When the battle of Aughrim, in which he fought, had given the last blow to all the expectations of the adherents of James, he retired into Spain with his wife and children, and was received at that court in a manner becoming his birth and connections. His two daughters were taken into the family of the queen dowager in quality of maids of honour, and in that station the elder, a woman of uncommon beauty, had the misfortune to be beloved by the famous Duke of Wharton, and the still greater misfortune to return his love. Notwithstanding the decided opposition of her royal mistress, she persisted in her determination to marry this "outcast of each church and state," and was that wife to whose fate Pope alludes in the well known line in his character of Clodio,

"A tyrant to the very wife he loved."

Her brother married a noble Spaniard, and two ladies descended from him are still living in Spain; the only remains of that branch of the family.

John,

John, second brother to Francis, on this subversion and dispersal of his family, took refuge among his relations thé O'Farrells, of the county of Longford, one of whom, the daughter of O'Farrell of Aughanaspeak, he married, and was killed in his own house by a party of rapparees, leaving his widow with two sons in their childhood. Of these, Thomas, the elder, was sent to receive his education in Spain, from whence he returned titular Bishop of Ardagh. Dennis, the younger, applied to the study of physic; but practising in an obscure part of the country, and having the prejudices of the times to contend with, he procured but a scanty subsistence for a wife and a numerous family. Similarity of circumstances, and alliances formed in better days, had made him acquainted with Catherine the daughter of Ross O'Farrell, the head of the distinguished and wealthy house of Moat Farrell, who had suffered in the general wreck of the revolution, and by his marriage with this lady, who lived to the very advanced age of ninety-nine, he had three sons and several daughters. Of the sons, two became Roman catholic priests. Lewis, the youngest, married Margaret O'Meagher, grand-daughter to Colonel Edmund O'Meagher, of Cloona, in the county of Tipperary; a woman of a very superior mind and understanding, and whose memory is still reverenced by all who knew her. The issue of this marriage were four sons and two daughters. Dennis, the second son, was originally designed for the profession of physic, and was sent to Paris in that view in the year 1765. But having a mind strongly tinctured with devotion, he entered into orders, and was parish-priest of Temple Michael, when Doctor O'Beirne became rector of it in 1791, on resigning his preferments in England. John, the third brother, served the office of high sheriff of the county of Longford, and commanded the light infantry company in the militia of that county during the whole of the last war. He is married to Miss Peacocke, daughter of Sir Joseph Peacocke, Bart. of the county of Clare, and niece to Lord Castle

Coote,

Coote, and Sir Eyre Coote. Andrew, the fourth brother, died an officer in the East India Company's service.

Thomas Lewis, the eldest son, whose life we are writing, was sent at the age of seven years to the diocesan school of Ardagh, then held in the town of Longford, by the Rev. Thomas Hynes, one of the most celebrated scholars of his day. Under the tuition of this worthy man he continued until the class to which he belonged went off to Trinity College, Dublin, in the year 1763. At this time peace being concluded with France, he was sent by his father, and an uncle who always lived and shared his income with him, to Paris, and entered under the care of Dr. O'Kelly, into what was called the Irish community, from its admitting young persons destined for other pursuits and professions, as well as for the Romish ministry, to which the college of Lombard, in the same enclosure, was exclusively devoted. From this seminary he attended the public course of academic studies in the college of Plessis, and was annually crowned, as well at the public distribution of prizes at that college, as in the university at large, until he concluded his year of rhetoric in the year 1767. At this time he fell into so bad a state of health, that he was advised by the physicians to try his native air, and in the beginning of the summer of 1768, he accompanied Mr. Usher, the ingenious author of Clio, or, a Discourse upon Taste, as far as London, from whence he shortly after returned to his father's house, after an absence of five years. Having in the course of the ensuing autumn and winter completely re-established his health, he once more quitted the paternal roof to return to Paris, with an intention to apply himself to the study of physic; but having remained for some months in London, he there formed connections, and adopted ideas, that changed the whole tenor of his life.

The first circumstance that led to the part he has since acted was the acquaintance and patronage of that worthy encourager of talents and merit wherever he discovered them,

the

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