and the other to his son William, Lord Herbert of Cardiff, for whose instruction the book was professedly prepared. A prefatory poem is signed ‘William Sa——.’ Barret deals largely with military tactics, and many interesting diagrams may be found among his pages. Some eight years later he completed a more ambitious production. After three years' labour he finished, ‘26 March, anno 1606,’ the longest epic poem in the language, numbering more than 68,000 lines. The work never found a publisher, and is still extant in a unique manuscript. It was entitled ‘The Sacred Warr. An History conteyning the Christian Conquest of the Holy Land by Godfrey de Buillion Duke of Lorraine, and sundrye other Illustrious Christian Heroes. Their Lyues, Acts, and Gouernments even untill Jherusalem's Lamentable Reprieze by Saladdin, Ægypts Calyph and Sultan,’ with continuations down to 1588. The authorities cited are ‘the chronicles of William Archbishoppe of Tyrus, the Protoscribe of Palestine, of Basilius Johannes Heraldius and sundry other.’ The poem is in alternate rhymes; the language is stilted and affected and contains many newly-coined words. In an address to the reader, Barret apologises for intermixing ‘so true and grave an history with Poetical fictions, phrases, narrations, digressions, reprizes, ligations,’ and so forth; but Sallust and Du Bartas have been his models. The work is in thirty-two books, and at its close are ‘An Exhortacion Elegiacall to all European Christians against the Turks,’ in verse, and an account in prose of ‘the Military Offices of the Turkish Empery.’ The completed volume bears date 1613. The manuscript at one time belonged to Southey the poet; it subsequently passed into the Corser Library, and thence into the possession of James Crossley of Manchester. Shakespeare, according to Chalmers, caricatured Barret as Parolles in ‘All's well that ends well.’ But the statement is purely conjectural. Parolles (iv. 3, 161–3, Globe ed.) is spoken of as ‘the gallant militarist—that was his own phrase—that had the whole theoric of war in the knot of his scarf, and the practice in the chape of his dagger’—words which may possibly allude to the title of Barret's military manual, but are in themselves hardly sufficient to establish a more definite connection between him and Parolles.
[Corser's Collectanea, i. 193; Chalmers's Edition of Shakespeare; Brit. Mus. Cat.]
BARRET, WILLIAM (d. 1584), was British consul at Aleppo when Mr. John Eldred and his companion, William Shales, arrived there on 11 June 1584, and he died eight days after their arrival, as is recorded in Eldred's narrative. He wrote a treatise on ‘The Money and Measures of Babylon, Balsara, and the Indies, with the Customes, &c.,’ which occupies pp. 406 to 416 of the second volume of Hakluyt's ‘Collection of Voyages,’ folio edition, 1810. His notes have a certain value to metrologists, but the only generally interesting portion of his treatise is the paragraph recording the discovery of the island of St. Helena, and its use as a provision depôt for the ‘Portugale’ traders with India.
[Hakluyt's Collection of Voyages, 1810, ii. 405–416.]
BARRET, WILLIAM (fl. 1595), divine, matriculated as a pensioner of Trinity College, Cambridge, on 1 Feb. 1579–80. He proceeded to his M.A. degree in 1588, and was soon afterwards elected fellow of Caius College. In a ‘Concio ad Clerum,’ preached by him for the degree of B.D. at Great St. Mary's, on 29 April 1595, he violently attacked the Calvinistic tenets, then popular at Cambridge. Whinlst rejecting the doctrine of assurance and of the indefectibility of grace, he also handled with unusual freedom the names of Calvin, Peter Martyr, and other believers in unconditioned reprobation. This public attack was not allowed to pass unnoticed. The vice-chancellor, Dr. Dupont, conferred privately with Barret, who, however, remained contumacious, and was next summoned before the heads of colleges. After several conferences, in which Barret acknowledged the justice of the inferences drawn from his sermon, he was ordered to recant. He accordingly read a prescribed form of withdrawal at St. Mary's on 10 May 1595, but in an ‘unreverend manner,’ significant of his unchanged views. On the 20th of the same month some forty fellows memorialised the vice-chancellor in favour of Barret's punishment. Once more he was summoned before the heads of colleges, and threatened with expulsion. But, taking advantage of a libellous account of his sermon circulated by the authorities of St. John's, he appealed to Archbishop Whitgift, a course also adopted by his accusers. The primate, in reply, censured the hasty proceedings of the heads of colleges, who upon this appealed to Lord Burghley, their chancellor, asking permission to punish Barret. The chancellor at first gave his assent, which he withdrew at the request of Whitgift. The heads now saw that they had gone too far, and in the month of September wrote to the primate, begging that he would settle the matter by inquiry
