died 1797.

BEYOND the mere fact that she was an Irishwoman who had come to London hoping to earn a living by writing, we know nothing more of the private life of Eliza Ryves. D'Israeli says she was descended from an Irish family of distinction, and as there was, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, a Jerome Ryves, D.D., Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, it is not improbable but that she was a member of this family.

In her earlier days she had possessed consider able property, but was deprived of it through the chicanery of the law. Being thus left destitute, she looked to her pen as a source of existence.

Her first literary effort was a comic opera, called “The Prude,” which she wrote in 1777. Failing in her endeavours to have it acted, she published it amongst a collection of her poems. The dialogue of this piece is chaste, animated, and original; and it is very likely that the high tone which pervades it was the cause of its failure in an age when a certain amount of coarseness was necessary to make a comic piece take the taste of the audience. The Prude of the piece is a pretended one, being none other than an intriguing old woman, aunt to the heroine of the drama. She is represented as concerting with a friar, Dominick Doubleface, to force her niece into a nunnery, and to trick her brother out of his property.