Ferguson, Sir Samuel

(1810-1886)

   Poet and antiquary, b. at Belfast, the s. of parents of Scottish extraction, he was ed. at Trinity Coll., Dublin, from which he received in 1865 the honorary degree of LL.D. He practised with success as a barrister, became Q.C. in 1859, and Deputy Keeper of the Irish Records 1867, an appointment in which he rendered valuable service, and was knighted in 1878. He was a contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, in which appeared his best known poem, The Forging of the Anchor, and was one of the chief promoters of the Gaelic revival in Irish literature. His coll. poems appeared under the title of Lays of the Western Gael (1865), Congal, an epic poem (1872), and his prose tales posthumously (1887), as Hibernian Nights' Entertainments. His principal antiquarian work was Ogham Inscriptions in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.