Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), though born at Blackbourton in England, belonged to a family which had been settled in different parts of Ireland and finally at Edgeworthstown, Co.  Longford, for nearly two hundred years.  She was the daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817), who was distinguished for his inventions, for his eccentricity, and for his varied matrimonial experiences, and who himself figures in literature as the author of Memoirs, posthumously published in 1820, and as the partner with his daughter in Practical Education (1798) and in an Essay on Irish Bulls (1802).  Maria had a busy literary career and was before the public for fifty-two years from 1795 to 1847.  She wrote Moral Tales; Popular Tales; Tales from Fashionable Life; and Harrington; but she is now best remembered for her three masterpieces dealing with Irish life and conditions, namely, Castle Rackrent (1800); The Absentee (1812); and Ormond (1817).  By these works she inspired Scott, as he himself tells us, to attempt for his own country something “of the same kind with that which she had so fortunately achieved for Ireland”, and in a later day she inspired Turgenief to do similarly for Russia.  She excels in wit and pathos and gives a true and vivid presentation of the times and conditions as she viewed them.

Andrew Cherry (1763-1821), born in Limerick, became an actor, a theatrical manager, and a playwright.  He wrote nine or ten plays, several of which were moderately successful.  The one that is now remembered is The Soldier’s Daughter.  Some of his songs, such as “The Bay of Biscay”, “Tom Moody, the Whipper-in”, and, especially, “The Green Little Shamrock of Ireland”, bid fair to be immortal.

Other Irish song-writers were Thomas Duffet (fl. 1676), author of “Come all you pale lovers”; Arthur Dawson (1700?-1775), author of “Bumpers, Squire Jones”; George Ogle (1742-1814), author of “Molly Asthore”; Richard Alfred Millikin (1767-1815), author of the grotesque “Groves of Blarney”; Edward Lysaght (1763-1811), author of “Our Ireland”, “The Gallant Man who led the van Of the Irish Volunteers”, and “Kate of Garnavilla”; George Nugent Reynolds (1770?-1802), author of “Kathleen O’More”; Thomas Dermody (1775-1802), author of the collection of poems and songs known as The Harp of Erin; James Orr (1770-1816), author of “The Irishman”; Henry Brereton Code (d. 1830), author of “The Sprig of Shillelah”; Charles Wolfe (1791-1823), author of “If I had thought thou couldst have died”, and of “The Burial of Sir John Moore”; and Charles Dawson Shanly (1811-1875), author of “Kitty of Coleraine”.