In March 1854 the committee of First Belfast Presbyterian Church consented to the erection of a memorial tablet in commemoration of the life of a former member, William Tennent. In and of itself, this was far from remarkable. First Belfast was a long-established congregation with a respectable, wealthy membership and over the course of the nineteenth century its walls were adorned with numerous memorials commemorating both the ministers who served the church and the upright citizens who worshipped under them. What distinguishes William Tennent's memorial, however, is its scale: in contrast to the sober plaques that surround it, it incorporates an elaborate sculpture in which Tennent is depicted reposing, book in hand, under a tree, while, in the rear, two men are busily engaged unloading sacks of merchandise from a ship. Beneath this striking image, an inscription records that Tennent was born near Roseyards, County Antrim, on 26 June 1759; that he died in Belfast, some seventy-three years later, on 20 July 1832; and that he ‘employed the leisure won from an arduous mercantile career in the cultivation of science and letters’. He was, it continues, ‘a consistent advocate of free inquiry and rational liberty […] moderate in times of popular excitement and firm when exposed to the reaction of power’; and ‘he found his chief happiness in the affection of his family and friends’.