Justice of Nevis by his wife, Eleanor Roche, became Attorney-General of St. Vincent the year after Trafalgar.
It was in this volcanic island, perpetually robed in luxuriant tropical vegetation from mountain top to seashore, that the subject of our memoir was born on May 22nd, 1817.
His mother, the second wife of his father, was Charlotte Martha, younger daughter and co-heiress of Captain Alexander Burrowes Irwin, of an ancient Irish family in the counties of Dublin, Meath, and Tipperary, and of the Union Estate in St. Vincent.
Captain Irwin had come with the 32nd Foot to these pleasant summer seas in 1764, and he served with it there for ten years. He did not, however, return to Ireland with his regiment, as, having obtained a grant of land in one of the most fruitful hollows of the old home of the Caribs, he passed the remainder of his life on his estate in St. Vincent, and died there in 1806. His only son, Henry Bury Irwin, captain in the 68th Regiment, was killed at the battle of the Nivelle in the Peninsular War.
Like his father and others of the family before him, George Webbe Dasent was sent over to England to be educated at Westminster School, entering there so long ago as 1830 (after being for a short time at Lendon's well-known preparatory school at Totteridge), when George the Fourth was still upon the throne.
He boarded at Mrs. Stelfox's house, and amongst his schoolfellows were the present Duke of Richmond, Lord Esher, the late Master of the Rolls, and Sir John Mowbray, until quite lately the Father of the House of Commons.
