Ireland -- History -- Rebellion of 1798; Women -- Ireland -- Biography
Alas! Alas! how short the moment to which we may cry with Faust, “tarry
awhile, thou art so fair.” Very speedily, Elizabeth Emmet’s “fair
moment” passed. In February, 1789, her son, Christopher Temple, went
“circuit” in Munster—and one day to those who waited his return in the
pleasant home in Stephen’s Green there came the tragic news of his death
from smallpox. The blow was too severe for Christopher’s young wife. She
died a few months after her husband, leaving their little daughter,
Kitty, to the care of her grandparents. Elizabeth Emmet had to live
on—to face the sorrows that yet awaited her.
At the desire of Dr. Emmet, the second son, Thomas Addis, anxious “to
fill” as far as in him lay, “the place of his brother,” turned aside
from the profession of medicine, in which he had already graduated, and
took up that of law. He was called to the Bar in 1790. In 1791, he
married Miss Jane Patten, daughter of Rev. John Patten of Clonmel, his
choice of a bride giving the greatest satisfaction to his father and
mother.
At first the young couple lived with the old Doctor and his wife, as
part of the one household; but as the little grandchildren began to fill
the nursery, it was found desirable to provide separate establishments.
The Doctor, with this end in view, divided his house in Stephen’s Green,
West, into two portions. It stood (and still stands, divided as the
Doctor left it into two residences) at the corner of Lamb’s Lane and
Stephen’s Green, West,[12] and the Doctor kept the corner portion for
himself and assigned the inner to his son’s family. Thomas Addis Emmet
had, also, as we know from Tone’s “Autobiography,” “a charming villa” at
Rathfarnham, and doubtless the whole family were made welcome in it,
whenever the call of the countryside overbid the attractions of the
town, in the years previous to Dr. Emmet’s purchase of Casino—the
country residence where he spent his last years.
Footnote 12:
Mr. Reynolds identifies them as 124 and 125 Stephen’s Green, West. In
Dr. Emmet’s time the house was numbered 109.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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