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VIII. 



BARXABY RICH'S ''REMEMBRANCES OF THE STATE OF 

 IRELAND, 1612," WITH NOTICES OF OTHER MANU- 

 SCRIPT REPORTS, BY THE SAME T^TJTER, ON 

 IRELAND TNDER JAMES THE FIRST. 



By C. LITTON FALKINER. 



Read May 28. Ordered for publication May 30. 

 Published July 28, 1906. 



The author of the ensuing "Remembrances," Captain Barnaby Rich, 

 is well known to students of the early seventeenth-century history of 

 Ireland as a prolific and withal somewhat polemical contributor to 

 the history of Irish affairs at that period. He is also, and perhaps 

 better, known to a wider circle as an author not without some signi- 

 ficance in the history of English literature. Born before the close of 

 Henry the Eighth's reign, and surviving to the middle of James the 

 First's, Rich passed a long life in active employment as a soldier, at 

 first in the Low Countries, and later, from about the year 1577, in 

 Ireland. Rich was a characteristic, though scarcely an eminent, 

 illustration of the facility with which the soldiers of Elizabeth could 

 exchange the sword for the pen. He forms one of that notable 

 group of Elizabethan men of letters closely connected with Ireland, in 

 which Spenser's and Raleigh's are the most illustrious figures, but 

 which includes such lesser lights of literature as Sir Geoffrey Fenton, 

 the translator of Bandello's novels ; Ludovic Bryskett, the friend of 

 Spenser, and one of the lyrists of ' Astrophel ' ; Barnaby Googe the 

 poet ; and Sir John Davies, who first won with his poem of ' Nosce 

 Teipsum ' the literary fame which his book on Ireland enlarged and 

 preserved. The list of Rich's printed works, which are twenty-four in 

 number, occupies, even after a rigorous abbreviation of their inordi- 

 nately lengthy titles, as many as four columns of the careful memoir 

 which Mr. Sidney Lee has devoted to their author in the " Dictionary 

 of National Biography. But although he is not without merit as a 



^ Besides the notice in the "Dictionary of National Biography," a careful 

 account of Bich will be found in the Introduction to an edition of his " Honestie 

 of this Age," prepared by Peter Cunningham for the Percy Society in 1844. 



R.I. A. PROC, VOL. XXVI., SEC. c] [13] 



