born september 1st, 1790. died june 4th, 1849.

ONE of the most brilliant women of this century, Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, was the third child and second daughter of an Irish squireen, named Edmund Power, of Knockbritt, near Clonmel, in the County Tipperary. A good-looking Irishman, with a certain amount of dash and swagger about him, Power lived as best he could upon his very small estate, the income from which never exceeded a few hundreds a years. Familiarly known throughout the county as “Beau Power” or “Shiver the Frills,” he kept up an appearance of hospitality, which his actual circumstances did not, by any means, warrant. The natural result was continual debt and embarrassment. He was a thoroughly unprincipled man—“a rough, rude specimen of the Irish middle class of sixty years ago; handsome and rollicking, illiterate and pretentious, fond of rioting and revellings, of field-sports and garrison society, dissipated abroad and brutal at home. In '98 he was a magistrate, hunting rebels, though a Roman Catholic himself; the end of which hunting was, that he shot one under suspicious circumstances of undue haste, was tried for murder, but acquitted. The mother, of the name of Sheehy, was a plain, uncultivated woman, without pretension of any sort; a negation of all gifts, of whom nothing particular is recorded, but that she died in Clarendon Street, Dublin, some twenty years ago.”