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 Prince