Page:A Compendium of Irish Biography.djvu/34

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Catholic lords. In February 1703, he joined with many Irish Catholics in an unavailing petition against the infraction of the Treaty of Limerick. He died 14th June 1725, and was buried at Lusk. 216

Baron, Bonaventure, a Franciscan writer, nephew to Luke Wadding, was born in Clonmel early in the 17th century. He lived for sixty years in Rome, where he died, old and blind, on 18th March 1696. He was buried at St. Isidore's College, in which he had been for some time Prelector of Divinity. Baron was noted for the purity of his Latin style. Ware enumerates fourteen books written by him in that language. 339

Barre, Isaac, the son of a Huguenot refugee, was born in Dublin in the first half of the 18th century. Educated at Trinity College, he took his degree in 1745; he entered the army, and rose to high rank, being Adjutant-General under Wolfe at Quebec in 1759. Afterwards, in Parliament, he distinguished himself by his opposition to the American Stamp Act. In 1776, he was made Vice-Treasurer of Ireland and Privy Councillor, and subsequently held other offices of trust under Government. He died in 1802. 151 166

Barrett, Eaton Stannard, a writer of considerable merit, was born in Cork towards the end of the 18th century. Although he entered the Middle Temple, he does not appear to have followed the law, but rather to have embraced literature. He was a man of great private worth and attractive manners. Besides Lines on Woman, his best known work is The Heroine, a mock romance of wonderful liveliness and humour. He died in Glamorganshire, of decline, 20th March 1820. Several communications regarding his writings will be found in Notes and Queries, 1st and 2nd Series. His brother, Richard Barrett, editor of The Dublin Pilot, was a fellow prisoner of O'Connell's, and died at Dalkey about 1855. 16 39 254

Barrett, George, an eminent landscape painter, born in Dublin in 1730. He was one of the originators and first members of the Royal Academy, and was in the latter part of his life, appointed master painter to Chelsea Hospital, through the influence of his friend Edmund Burke. He died at Paddington in 1784. "He was a chaste and faithful delineator of English landscape, which he viewed with the eye of an artist, and selected with the feeling of a man of taste. His colouring is excellent, and there is a freshness and dewy brightness in his verdure, which is only to be met with in English scenery, and which he has perfectly represented." 277

Barrett, John, D.D., son of a clergyman at Ballyroan. When but six years of age his father died, and his mother removed to Dublin. He entered Trinity College as a pensioner in 1767, obtained a scholarship in 1773, a fellowship in 1778, and was elected Vice-Provost in 1807. He was Professor of Oriental Languages. For the last fifty years of his life, he scarcely ever left the College—occupying a garret in the Library Square, allowing himself little light and no fire, but stealing down to the College kitchen to warm himself, where his presence was not acceptable to the servants, on account of his ragged and miserable appearance. He was of low stature, with a huge head and small feet, so that he looked like an equilateral triangle standing on its vertex. His habits were such as would perhaps effectually exclude him from decent society in the present day. "He spent his life in almost solitary seclusion, devoted to the two passions that absorbed him—reading, and the most penurious hoarding of money—the latter habit being probably induced by the extreme poverty of his early life; yet, with all this, he was a man of the strictest integrity, and was never known to commit a dishonourable action. With strong feelings, he indulged in cursing and swearing as a thoughtless habit; he was ever ready to do kind actions, provided he was not called on to give money, and though ignorant of everything that pertained to the most ordinary affairs of life, his mind was a perfect storehouse of strange knowledge, and his memory so tenacious that he could remember almost everything he had seen, or read." 39 His most important literary achievement was the discovery of an old palimpsest MS. of fragments of the Gospel of St. Matthew. Many stories are told of his uncouth ways and absence of mind concerning ordinary matters—of his being found absorbed in thought, attentively regarding an egg in his hand while his watch was boiling in the saucepan; of his wonder at finding that mutton was made from sheep; of the two holes in his door, a large one to let in his big cat, and a small one to let in his little cat; of his surprise at seeing a crow in the College Park, and his discovery, after some study among the classics, that it was "a corvus, by Jove." His principal works were concerning the Zodiac, an essay on the life of Swift, and comments on St. Matthew. In the first of these, he propounded the wildest and most fanciful theories. He died on 15th November 1821, leaving most of his property for charitable purposes. 16 39 116(18) 233 10