Page:Biographia Hibernica volume 2.djvu/597

 593 MARY TIGHE, A very superior woman both in mind and acquirements, was born in Dublin, in 1774. Her father was the Rev. William Blashford, librarian of St. Patrick's Library, Dub lin; and her mother, Theodosia Tighe, of Rosanna, in the county of Wicklow. She had the misfortune to lose her father while an infant; but by the care of her excellent mother, her fine intellectual powers were developed and cultivated. In early life she appears to have mixed with the gay world; but an extreme sensibility, joined to great delicacy of sentiment, soon decided her preference for retirement, where, happy in her choice of a partner, and devoted to her relatives and friends, hope pointed ex ultingly to happiness, but sickness and death made their inroad in the choice circle; the loss of relatives joined with other causes, undermined her own health, and after a painful struggle of six years, she departed this life with christian resignation and confiding hope, at Woodstock, in the county of Kilkenny, on the 24th of March, 1810, in the thirty-seventh year of her age. Her beautiful poem of Psyche will be remembered as long as elegance and classical taste can excite admiration; nor will her minor poems be forgotten, whilst piety, deli cacy, and the most touching pathos have power to charm. With the profits arising from the above poems, an hospital ward has been endowed and attached to the House of Refuge (a charitable institution founded by her mother in the county of Wicklow), which is called the Psyche ward. ' She married her cousin, Henry Tighe, a man of con siderable talent, who has been deceased about three years. Mr. T. represented the county of Wicklow in Parliament, at the time of his decease. He was the author of “The Statistical History of the County of Kilkenny,” a thick 8vo. published in 1799, by far the best of those county histories published under the auspices of the Dublin Society. WOL. I. I. QQ