“This excellent woman, full of years, rich in virtue, surrounded by affectionate children—prosperous, happily circumstanced, dutiful and loving children to her, worthy of their inheritance of a great name, and of the honour that descended to them from the revered memory of her truly noble husband—thus terminated in a foreign land a long career, chequered by many trials, over which a virtuous woman’s self-sacrificing devotion, the courage and constancy of a faithful wife, the force of a mother’s love eventually prevailed. The portrait of this lady is in the possession of Mr. John Patten.[75] The time may come when this intimation may be of some avail. Ireland has its Cornelias, its Portias—matrons worthy of association in our thoughts with Cato’s daughter, the mother of the children who were the jewels of her heart—with the wife of Russell, of Lavalette—but Ireland has no national gallery for the pictures and busts of her illustrious children—no literature for a record of the ‘noble deeds of women’ of her own land.” Footnote 75: Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet informs us that “nothing is now known of this portrait.” The two portraits reproduced in his own book were by her daughter Elizabeth, Mrs. Le Roy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Wife of Samuel Neilson ANNE NEILSON _née_ _Bryson_ (1763-1811)[76] “I love you the more, Love, because of their hate.” —ETHNA CARBERY. Footnote 76: _Authorities_: Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Fourth Series, Second Edition. NO woman, of all those whose stories we are recalling to the memory of a people in danger of forgetting them, has suffered so much as Mrs. Neilson. Not alone had she to see her happy home broken up, the ease and comfort to which she had been accustomed both in her father’s and her husband’s house, taken from her, her children deprived of their father and herself of a helpmate, the turning away from her necessities of former friends—but worse than all this she had to endure the intolerable pain of knowing that the reward her husband had won even from his own countrymen, even from those for whose sake he had sacrificed his all—was to be branded as a traitor, and to have his name whispered from mouth to mouth as that of one who had betrayed Lord Edward, and sold the secrets of his associates to Government to purchase his own safety. It is with hearts very full, then, that we turn to the appealing and lonely figure of this “dear dead woman,” and standing in spirit by her grave in Newtownbreda Cemetery we frame passionate prayers that she may know her sufferings have not been in vain.