Samuel Madden (author)

Samuel Madden (1686-1765) was a British author.

Life 1686-1765 [known as ‘Premium Madden’]; b. 23rd Dec., Dublin; nephew of William Molyneux, his mother being a Molyneux of Castle Dillon; ed. TCD, ord. 1721; living at Drumraully, nr. Newtownbutler; DD, 1723; visited London, 1729; published Themistocles, the Lover of His Country (Lincoln Fields, Feb. 1729), a tragedy; established premiums for learning at Trinity College, Dublin and Royal Dublin Society [RDS], which he founded with Thomas Prior, 1731; offered £50 for the author of an Irish invention improving any useful art or manufacture; paid Samuel Johnson £10 in London to improve a poem; issued Memoirs Of the Twentieth Century [sic] (1733), suppressed by the author at the instance of Sir Robert Walpole and now very rare; Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (1738), containing 32 anti-absenteeist resolutions; d. Fermanagh; Mary Delany has left an account of him in her Letters, while his bounty was still remembered in an oration of Dr. Thomas Sheridan’s oration (6 Dec. 1757); Dr. Johnson wrote, ‘his was a name which Ireland ought to honour’; there is a portrait by R. Hunter and R. Purcell in the National Gallery of Ireland and another by Stephen Slaughter; also, an unattributed head of Madden sculpted in marble in the RDS Members’ Room (Ballsbridge, Dublin). CAB DNB PI DIB DIW [FDA]

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Works Themistocles; The Lover of His Country (Dublin: S. Power 1729), [x], 63, [ii]pp., Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (Dublin 1738; rep. 1816); Memoirs Of the Twentieth Century (1733). See also Letters of Lord Chesterfield to Faulkner, Dr Madden, &c (1770), as Supplement [now Vols. III & IV of Stanhope’s edition of Chesterfield’s Works].