GRAVES, Alfred Perceval. Songs of Killarney.

London: Bradbury 1873. First edition. 12mo. pp. viii, 175. Publisher’s green cloth, titled in gilt with decoration on upper cover,
replicated in blind on lower. Covers lightly faded. A good copy. Very scarce.
Alfred Perceval Graves, poet and educationist, was born on 22 July 1846 at 12 Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, second of the eight children of Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick. In 1864 he went to Trinity College, where he later won a university scholarship in classics; but in 1867 he joined the English civil service before completing his degree course. In London he combined the duties of a clerkship in the Home Office with literary work, and contributed lively poems to ‘Punch’, the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’, and other periodicals. Graves’s first book of poems, ‘Songs of Killarney’ (1873) was well received, especially by ‘The Spectator’, to which he became a regular contributor. On 29 December 1874 he married the beautiful Jane Cooper eldest daughter of James Cooper of Cooper’s Hill, near Limerick. Graves (a devout protestant, who was reputed never to have made an enemy) presided in 1891 over the inaugural meeting of the ‘Irish Literary Society’ of London, of which he was twice president. In 1912 he was installed as a Welsh bard under the name Canwr Cilarne (Singer of Killarney); and in 1919 he retired to ‘Erinfa’, his holiday home at Harlech in north Wales.

[L3 4A]