Eliot Bartholomew George Warburton

Warbuton, Eliot Bartholomew George, an author, was born near Tullamore in 1810. He matriculated at Cambridge, and was called to the Irish Bar, but soon abandoned the law for the oversight of his Irish estates and the pleasures of society, foreign travel, and literature. During an extended tour in the Mediterranean, about 1842, he contributed to the Dublin University Magazine some "Episodes of Eastern Travel." By the advice of Mr. Lever, these were collected, amplified, and published under the title of The Crescent and the Cross. The work was most successful, and within fifteen years went through as many editions. "A changeful truth, a versatile propriety of feeling, initiates the author, as it were, into the heart of each successive subject; and we find him as profoundly impressed with the genius of the Holy Land, as he is steeped, in the proper place, in the slumberous influences of the dreamy Nile, upon whose bosom he rocks his readers into a trance, to be awakened only by the gladsome originality of those melodies which come mirthfully on their ears from either bank."[116] Besides minor works, he wrote Memoirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers, 3 vols., 1849; and two novels — Reginald Hastings (1850) and Darien (1851). In this last book he gives a vivid account of the destruction of a vessel by fire. He sailed for the West Indies in the mail steamer Amazon, on 2nd January 1852. When but 120 miles from the Lizard, the ship took fire, and 102 out of the 161 souls on board perished. Mr. Warburton was last seen standing beside the captain on the deck of the burning vessel.

Sources

7. Annual Register. London, 1756-1877.

16. Authors, Dictionary of British and American: S. Austin Allibone. 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1859-'71.

116. Dublin University Magazine (39). Dublin, 1833-'77.