The Purcell Papers, vol 1 | Page 3

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THE
PURCELL PAPERS.
BY THE LATE
JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU,
AUTHOR
OF 'UNCLE SILAS.'
With a Memoir by
ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
MEMOIR OF JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU
THE GHOST
AND THE BONE-SETTER
THE FORTUNES OF SIR ROBERT
ARDAGH
THE LAST HEIR OF CASTLE CONNOR
THE
DRUNKARD'S DREAM
MEMOIR
OF
JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU.

A noble Huguenot family, owning
considerable property in
Normandy, the Le
Fanus of Caen, were, upon the revocation of the

Edict of Nantes, deprived of their ancestral estates
of Mandeville,
Sequeville, and Cresseron; but,
owing to their possessing influential
relatives at
the court of Louis the Fourteenth, were allowed
to quit
their country for England, unmolested,
with their personal property.
We meet with
John Le Fanu de Sequeville and Charles Le Fanu
de
Cresseron, as cavalry officers in William the
Third's army; Charles

being so distinguished a
member of the King's staff that he was
presented
with William's portrait from his master's own
hand. He
afterwards served as a major of
dragoons under Marlborough.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century,
William Le Fanu was the
sole survivor of his
family. He married Henrietta Raboteau de

Puggibaut, the last of another great and noble
Huguenot family,
whose escape from France, as
a child, by the aid of a Roman Catholic
uncle in
high position at the French court, was effected
after
adventures of the most romantic danger.
Joseph Le Fanu, the eldest of the sons of this
marriage who left issue,
held the office of Clerk of
the Coast in Ireland. He married for the
second
time Alicia, daughter of Thomas Sheridan and
sister of
Richard Brinsley Sheridan; his brother,
Captain Henry Le Fanu, of
Leamington, being
united to the only other sister of the great wit

and orator.
Dean Thomas Philip Le Fanu, the eldest son
of Joseph Le Fanu,
became by his wife Emma,
daughter of Dr. Dobbin, F.T.C.D., the
father of
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the subject of this
memoir,
whose name is so familiar to English
and American readers as one of
the greatest
masters of the weird and the terrible amongst
our
modern novelists.
Born in Dublin on the 28th of August, 1814,
he did not begin to
speak until he was more
than two years of age; but when he had once

started, the boy showed an unusual aptitude in
acquiring fresh
words, and using them correctly.
The first evidence of literary taste which he
gave was in his sixth year,
when he made
several little sketches with explanatory remarks

written beneath them, after the manner of Du
Maurier's, or Charles
Keene's humorous illustrations
in 'Punch.'

One of these, preserved long afterwards by
his mother, represented a
balloon in mid-air,
and two aeronauts, who had occupied it, falling

headlong to earth, the disaster being explained
by these words: 'See
the effects of trying to go
to Heaven.'
As a mere child, he was a remarkably good
actor, both in tragic and
comic pieces, and was
hardly twelve years old when he began to
write
verses of singular spirit for one so young. At
fourteen, he
produced a long Irish poem, which
he never permitted anyone but his
mother and
brother to read. To that brother, Mr. William
Le Fanu,
Commissioner of Public Works,
Ireland, to whom, as the suggester of

Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Phaudrig Croohore' and
'Shamus O'Brien,'
Irish ballad literature owes a
delightful debt, and whose richly
humorous and
passionately pathetic powers as a raconteur of
these
poems have only doubled that obligation in
the hearts of those who
have been happy enough
to be his hearers--to Mr. William Le Fanu

we are indebted for the following extracts from
the first of his works,
which the boy-author seems
to have set any store by:
'Muse of Green Erin, break thine icy slumbers!
Strike once again thy wreathed lyre!
Burst forth once more and wake
thy tuneful numbers!
Kindle again thy long-extinguished fire!
'Why should I bid thee, Muse of Erin, waken?
Why should I bid thee strike thy harp once more?
Better to leave thee
silent and forsaken
Than wake thee but thy glories to deplore.
'How could I bid thee tell of Tara's Towers,
Where once thy sceptred Princes sate in state--
Where rose thy music,
at the festive hours,
Through the proud halls where listening
thousands

sate?
'Fallen are thy fair palaces, thy country's glory,
Thy tuneful bards were banished or were slain,
Some rest in glory on
their deathbeds gory,
And some have lived to feel a foeman's chain.
'Yet for the sake of thy unhappy nation,
Yet for the sake of Freedom's spirit fled,
Let thy wild harpstrings,
thrilled with indignation,
Peal a deep requiem o'er thy sons