Author: West, Matthew
Biography:
WEST, Matthew (c. 1748-1814: Blacker)
No information about his place of birth or parents has been located. He entered Trinity College Dublin as a scholar in 1766 (BA 1768, MA 1773), and was appointed curate at St. Mary’s, Donnybrook in Dublin, in 1772. He was made vicar of Carnallaway, County Kildare in 1777; he also served as Vicar of Clane and, for a time, was chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Cork. He was twice married: his first wife, Grace, died in June 1786; the name of his second wife is not known but she published a collection of his sermons in 1819. His first publications were two plays, Ethelinde; or, Love and Duty (1769) and Pizarro (1799), but neither was performed. Female Heroism was performed at Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre on 19 May 1804. The preface notes that West had abandoned writing the play when Edmund John Eyre’s (q.v.) Maid of Normandy was published on the same subject. He completed the work only when he realised that Eyre had made various errors of historical fact. West’s Poems has an impressive subscription list. He died in Donnybrook and was buried in the churchyard there on 13 Sept. 1814. The inscription on his tombstone states that he was in the sixty-sixth year of his life. (Beaver Henry Blacker, Brief Sketches of the Parishes of Booterstown and Donnybrook [1860]; Dublin University Magazine 46 [1855] 141) SR