From the Dublin Evening Post, 29 January 1839:
“FUNERAL OF THE LATE LORD CLEMENTS
The remains of this lamented young nobleman, whose death we announced on Saturday, were interred yesterday in the family vault of St Michan’s church.
The funeral was, as himself directed, private; but the deep and unfeigned grief with which the intelligence of his death has been received by all who knew him, of every rank and station, every religious and political opinion, bears testimony to the character of his life.
Titles of honor, add to that his worth,
Who was himself an honor to his title.
His services as a member of the legislature have been prematurely closed; but even in the short period of their exercise sufficient was done to manifest his honest and liberal principles, his sound and unbiased judgment, his talents and uncompromising independence, and his unpurchased devotion to his country. Nor was his private life less generally endeared. A fond son, an affectionate brother, a faithful friend, living in the centre of his tenantry, at his favourite residence (Lough Rynn, in the county of Leitrim), which seemed the congenial sphere of developing the best feelings of his heart – there his impulse was charity; the abodes of poverty brightened by his presence, and the reciprocal duties by which society should be maintained were ever cultivated with his warmest co-operation. He lived not for himself, and his loss is a public calamity.”
Lord Clements, heir to the 2nd Earl of Leitrim, whose family vault was at St Michan’s, was a young man in his early thirties. As a result of his death, his younger brother William Sydney Clements became the 3rd Earl. His funeral at St Michan’s in 1878, following on too ready an exercise of droit de seigneur over his female tenantry, was a very different, far less decorous, affair; read about it here.
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