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Sydney, Lady Morgan, authoress of "The Wild Irish Girl", 1856. 'Lady Morgan is to be numbered amongst self-educated geniuses. But that her education was sedulously attended to from her earliest years is proved by her knowledge of foreign languages, and early acquaintance with English classical literature, apparent, to the very verge of pedantry, in her first works...Her contemporaries have seen her sparkling forth at the very earliest period of her girlhood with a fertility, versatility, and at the same time strength and maturity of genius, perfectly unequalled by any of her age or sex. Gifted with a fervid imagination, with exuberant powers of invention, with an astonishing command of language, she possessed also in an eminent degree that faculty which ungallant critics are fain to deny to the ladies of the creation - humour - genuine, golden, inexhaustible - and even rollicking Irish humour...'. From "Illustrated London News", 1856.