Ferguson, SIR SAMUEL

Ferguson, SIR SAMUEL, poet and Celtic scholar, was born at Belfast in 1810, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and called to the bar in 1838. He gave himself more to Irish antiquities than to law, and in 1867 was appointed the first Deputy-keeper of Records in the Four Courts, in which capacity his qualities of organisation and arrangement were conspicuous. As president of the Royal Irish Academy he gave a powerful impetus to the scientific study of early Irish art, and its Transactions contain many invaluable papers from his pen. In 1878 he was knighted, and on 9th August 1886 he passed away (see the Life by his wife, 1896). His musical and spirited poems, steeped in the truest patriotism, early began to appear in Blackwood's, the Dublin University Magazine, &c.; The Forging of the Anchor (1831); Lays of the Western Gael (1865); Congal, a Poem in Five Books (1872); Poems (1880). His edition of the Lacabhar Brac appeared in 1876; his Ogham Inscriptions in 1887.