Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 03.djvu/256

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Barnes
250
Barnes

he was, as a contriver of new doctrine, thrust into a dungeon of the Inquisition. His mind giving way, he was removed to a lunatic asylum behind the church of St. Paul the Less, and he appears to have been confined there until his death, which occurred in August 1661. ‘If he was in his wits,’ wrote Father Leander Norminton from Rome, ‘he was an heretic; but they gave him christian burial because they accounted him rather a madman.’

By the reformed party Barnes is described as the good Irenæus, a learned, peaceable, and moderate man; but catholic writers, particularly of his own order, condemn his conduct in the severest terms. For example, Dom Bennet Weldon says (Chronological Notes, 138): ‘I have gathered many letters which show him to have tampered much with the state of England to become its pensioner, to mince the catholic truths that the protestants might digest them without choking, and so likewise to prepare the protestant errors that catholic stomachs might not loathe them. He was hard at work in the prosecution of this admirable project in the years 1625 and 1626. He took upon him in a letter to a nobleman of England, which is without date of year or month, to maintain out of true divinity the separation of England from the court of Rome as things then stood, and the oath of fidelity of the English communion, to be lawful and just according to the writers of the Roman church. And he says at the beginning of this wonderful letter, that he had been about eight years at work to get an opportunity of insinuating himself into his majesty's knowledge.’

Barnes wrote the following works: 1. ‘Examen Trophæorum Congregationis Prætensæ Anglicanæ Ordinis S. Benedicti.’ Rheims, 1622, 8vo, dedicated to Pope Urban VIII. It is a reply to Father Edward Mayhew's ‘Congregationis Anglicanæ Ordinis S. Benedicti Trophæa,’ Rheims, 1619. An answer to Barnes is found in some copies of Reyner's ‘Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Angliâ,’ but without a name to it or any mention of Barnes. 2. ‘Dissertatio contra Æquivocationes,’ Paris, 1625, 8vo. He attacks the arguments of Parsons and Lessius. 3. ‘The Spiritual Combat.’ Translated into Latin from the Spanish of John Castaniza. 4. ‘Catholico-Romanus Pacificus,’ Oxford, 1680, 4to. The manuscript was kept among the protestants at Oxford, and not printed till the year named. It is reprinted in Brown's edition of Gratius's ‘Fasciculus Rerum Expetendarum et Fugiendarum,’ Lond. 1690, fol. ii. 826–870. Before the work itself was printed in extenso, portions appeared at the end of Richard Watson's translation of Dr. Basire's treatise on ‘The Ancient Liberty of the Britannick Church,’ Lond. 1661, 8vo, with this separate title: ‘Select Discourses concerning, 1. Councils, the Pope, Schism. 2. The Priviledges of the Isle of Great Britain. 3. The Pope's Primacy and the Supream Power of Kings, both in Temporals, and also Spirituals, accordingly as they put on the quality of Temporals, and are means for the hindring, or procuring, the safety of the Republick.’

[Weldon's Chronological Notes, 79, 81, 97, 131, 135–139, 170, Append. 5; Reyner's Apostolat. Benedictinorum in Anglia, 214–221; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. (ed. Bliss), ii. 500; Oliver's Hist. of the Catholic Religion in Cornwall, 507; Dodd's Church Hist. ii. 134, iii. 101; Wadsworth's English Spanish Pilgrime, 2nd ed. 1630, p. 71; François, Bibl. des Ecrivains de l'Ordre de Saint Benoît, i. 93.]

T. C.

BARNES, JOSHUA (1654–1712), Greek scholar and antiquary, the son of a London tradesman, was born on 10 Jan. 1654. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and admitted a servitor of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on 11 Dec. 1671. He graduated B.A. in 1675, was elected to a fellowship in 1678, took the degree of M.A. in 1679, and of B.D. in 1686 (incorporated at Oxford July 1706). He was chosen professor of Greek in 1695.

At Christ's Hospital Barnes was remarkable for his precocity. When only fifteen years of age he published ‘Sacred Poems in Five Books,’ and in the following year a poem on the ‘Life of Oliver Cromwell the Tyrant.’ To the same date belong some dramatic pieces, in English and Latin, on Xerxes, Pythias and Damon, and similar subjects; a Latin poem on the fire of London and the plague; and a Latin elegy on the beheading of John the Baptist. In 1675 he published ‘Gerania, or the discovery of a little sort of people anciently discoursed of, called Pygmies,’ a whimsical voyage imaginaire that may perhaps have given Swift some hints for the ‘Voyage to Lilliput.’ His next publication was ‘Αὐλικοκάτοπτρον, sive Estheræ Historia, Poetica Paraphrasi, idque Græco carmine, cui versio Latina opponitur, exornata,’ 1679. In the preface to this book he states that he found it easier to write in Greek than in Latin, or even English, ‘since the ornaments of poetry are almost peculiar to the Greeks, and since he had for many years been extremely conversant in Homer, the great father and source of Greek poetry.’ Bentley used to say of him that he ‘knew as much Greek as a Greek cobbler’—a doubtful compliment. In 1688 he published a ‘Life of