George Moore said of Edward Martyn:

‘There is nobody like him. He is more wonderful than anything in literature.’ This inspired thought becomes vivid in Denis Gwynn’s story of Edward Martyn’s life. The memoir is compiled from extracts, chaotic in their confusion as they were left, from Edward Miartyn’s own writings. The result, however, despite the incompleteness of these papers, is the most enlightening story of the state of Ireland in a period when Edward Martyn contributed to its public life by his work of reform. They were the most vital movements of a reform in Ireland, which might never have existed or begun but for him whose courage, perseverance, learning, independence of mind and indifference to criticism, ridicule and hostility made him the most remarkable instance of what one great man of such qualities can do in the public service of his country.

Religion, literature and art always meant much more to him than politics and he had by nature and by grace an aristocracy of mind, a strong mind which estranged him from many literary friends. Religious by a native instinct, he the layman, was truly the ‘uncloistered monk,’ and he chose to live as a hermit, shunning the world : he lived in a garret, whitewashed and bare, in the tower of his ancestral castle of Tulira. Magnificent in his generosity, he would give all his possessions in the interests of education and the uplifting of his country, and to none was he more bountifully lavish than to him who would be the disciple of his idealism.

‘Originality’ was the sin of this son of Adam, but fortunately or unfortunately he could not hide it.