A noble Huguenot family,owning considerable property in Normandy,the Le Fanus of Caen,were,upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,deprived of their ancestral estates of Mandeville,Sequeville,and Cresseron;but,owing to their possessing influential relatives at the court of Louis the Fourteenth,were allowed to quit their country for England,unmolested,with their personal property.We meet with John Le Fanu de Sequeville and Charles Le Fanu de Cresseron,as cavalry officers in William the Third's army;Charles being so distinguished a member of the King's staff that he was presented with William's portrait from his master's own hand.He afterwards served as a major of dragoons under Marlborough.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century,William Le Fanu was the sole survivor of his family.He married Henrietta Raboteau de Puggibaut,the last of another great and noble Huguenot family,whose escape from France,as a child,by the aid of a Roman Catholic uncle in high position at the French court,was effected after adventures of the most romantic danger.
Joseph Le Fanu,the eldest of the sons of this marriage who left issue,held the office of Clerk of the Coast in Ireland.He married for the second time Alicia,daughter of Thomas Sheridan and sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan;his brother,Captain Henry Le Fanu,of Leamington,being united to the only 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 Princes sate in state--Where rose thy music,at the festive hours,Through the proud halls where listening thousands sate?
'Fallen are thy fair palaces,thy country's glory,Thy tuneful bards were banished or were slain,Some rest in glory on their deathbeds gory,And some have lived to feel a foeman's chain.
'Yet for the sake of thy unhappy nation,Yet for the sake of Freedom's spirit fled,Let thy wild harpstrings,thrilled with indignation,Peal a deep requiem o'er thy sons that bled.
'O yes!like the last breath of evening sighing,Sweep thy cold hand the silent strings along,Flash like the lamp beside the hero dying,Then hushed for ever be thy plaintive song.'
To Mr.William Le Fanu we are further indebted for the accompanying specimens of his brother's serious and humorous powers in verse,written when he was quite a lad,as valentines to a Miss G.K.:
'Life were too long for me to bear If banished from thy view;Life were too short,a thousand year,If life were passed with you.
'Wise men have said "Man's lot on earth Is grief and melancholy,"But where thou art,there joyous mirth Proves all their wisdom folly.
'If fate withhold thy love from me,All else in vain were given;Heaven were imperfect wanting thee,And with thee earth were heaven.'
A few days after,he sent the following sequel:
'My dear good Madam,You can't think how very sad I'm.
I sent you,or I mistake myself foully,A very excellent imitation of the poet Cowley,Containing three very fair stanzas,Which number Longinus,a very critical man,says,And Aristotle,who was a critic ten times more caustic,To a nicety fits a valentine or an acrostic.
And yet for all my pains to this moving epistle,I have got no answer,so I suppose I may go whistle.
Perhaps you'd have preferred that like an old monk I had pattered on In the style and after the manner of the unfortunate Chatterton;Or that,unlike my reverend daddy's son,I had attempted the classicalities of the dull,though immortal Addison.
I can't endure this silence another week;
What shall I do in order to make you speak?
Shall I give you a trope In the manner of Pope,Or hammer my brains like an old smith To get out something like Goldsmith?