Thomas Meredith

[1] Meredith's father, a member of the Royal Dublin Society, had chosen a legal career in Dublin and passed the management of Templerany (where his family had made their home since the late seventeenth century) to his younger brother, William Meredith, who lived there with his wife, Sarah Garrett of Janeville and Mount Pleasant House, County Carlow; niece of John Cole, 1st Baron Mountflorence, of Florence Court.

Following university he spent the next few years managing his property in counties Wicklow, Wexford and Dublin, but using his spare time to work on new mathematical theories.

His father-in-law, Richard Graves, wrote, "and now another apparently most calamitous visitation presents itself, in the sudden death of my beloved and excellent son-in-law, by apoplexy, a disorder of which of all men he seemed least liable."

The Freeman's Journal of Dublin reported, "Learned, amiable, and unassuming, Thomas Meredith was unfeignedly respected and sincerely beloved by his numerous acquaintance and friends, all of whom deeply deplore his premature departure.

The talents which he clothed in humility And his silent and unobtrusive benevolence Were unable to escape the respect and admiration of society: But those who witnessed him in the bosom of his family And shared the treasures of his conversation Seldom failed to find the ways of wisdom more pleasant than before And to discover fresh loveliness in that Gospel Upon which his hopes and his ministry were founded He was summoned from a family of which he was the support and delight And from the flock to which he was eminently endeared On 2nd May 1819 in the 42nd year of his age By a sudden and awful visitation but he knew That his Redeemer lived.

Charles Wolfe wrote a poem for Meredith, meant as a second epitaph intended for the tomb itself: Here lies in this lone spot, this holy shade, One less for earth than heavens high mansions made, Whose virtues all in paths untrodden moved, Too little known, alas!

Whom talent, science, wisdom, goodness crowned, With wreaths as gentle as these flowers around, Whose modest beauty shun all common eyes, To bless this sacred spot, these purer skies, And like his bloom in home's sequestered Vale, To him who gave them all their sweets exhale, But us't to human praise he sought not such, Unheeding all but his he loved so much, Then be our task to fit our minds to raise In purer Worlds a fitter song of praise, For them alone to know his worth is given Who lived on earth as Saints shall live in Heaven.

John A. Russell (Archdeacon of Clogher), introduces Meredith as follows, The following letter (quoted below) gives an affecting account of the death of a valued friend, to whom he (Wolfe) had lately become particularly attached, the Rev.

His genius for mathematical acquirements especially, was universally allowed to be of the first order; and his qualifications as a public examiner and lecturer were so eminent, as to render his early retirement from the duties of a fellowship a serious loss to the college.

Seemingly after Burton had squandered his property in Ireland, at the invitation of the 'Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts', he went to Terrebonne, Quebec, becoming the county's first Anglican minister.

Thomas Meredith's widow died at 84 Great King Street, Edinburgh, the home of Major Robert Graves Burton M.D., of the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons, one of her sons by her second marriage, on 31 March 1855.