for a more remote antiquity of Codex Z. In 1808 Barrett published ‘An Essay on the earlier part of the Life of Swift,’ which contains some interesting facts about the dean's college career.
Barrett was as remarkable for his eccentricities and personal deportment as for the extent and profundity of his philological and classical learning. He was a man of great acquirements, and his memory was so exceedingly tenacious that he could recollect almost everything he had ever seen or read, and yet he was so ignorant of the things of common life that he literally did not know a duck from a partridge, or that mutton was the flesh of sheep. He could speak and write Latin and Greek with fluency, but scarcely ever uttered a sentence of grammatical English. He was kind and good-natured, but was never known to give a penny in charity, and allowed his brother and sisters to live almost in want, leaving at his death some eighty thousand pounds to various charitable purposes and a mere pittance to his relatives. He allowed himself no fire, even in the coldest weather, and only a candle when he was reading. On one very severe night some fellow students found him sitting doubled up, very lightly clad, apparently reading for his Greek lecture, growing stiff and torpid with cold, a rushlight stuck in the back of his chair, and they claim to have saved his life by pouring hot rum-punch down his throat. He would sometimes go down to the kitchen to warm himself, but to this the servants objected on account of his dirty and ragged condition. He was very attentive to his religious duties, but freely indulged in cursing and swearing. The anecdotes about him are endless. At a dinner party in the hall of Trinity College, the scholar for the week (who stood too far from the high table to be distinctly heard), in place of the Latin grace, repeated to the proper length ‘Jackey Barrett thinks I'm reading the grace, Jackey Barrett thinks I'm reading the grace,’ &c., at the termination of which Barrett uttered a very pompous and grand ‘Amen.’ A student having dazzled his eyes with a looking-glass, the doctor fined him five shillings for ‘casting reflections on the heads of the college.’
[Dublin University Magazine, xviii. 350; The Academy, vol. xviii.; Forster's Life of Swift; Horne's Introduction to the Scriptures; Abbott's Codex Rescriptus Dublinensis; Notes and Queries, 5th ser. viii. 374; Catalogue of Graduates of Trinity College, Dublin.]
BARRETT, LUCAS (1837–1862), geologist and naturalist, born 14 Nov. 1837, was the son of a London ironfounder, and was sent, at the age of ten, to Mr. Ashton's school at Royston, in Cambridgeshire. There his tastes were soon made evident by the pleasure which he took in collecting fossils from the chalk pits of the neighbourhood. Passing thence to University College school, he became a frequent visitor to the British Museum, and was a great favourite with the officers of the natural history department. In 1853 and the following year he completed his education by studying German and chemistry at Ebersdorf, and made a geological trip into Bavaria. By this time young Barrett's tastes were fully developed, and it was plain that natural history was to be the engrossing occupation of his life. At first the marine fauna of northern seas claimed his attention, and he accompanied Mr. m'Andrew (in 1855) in a dredging trip between Shetland and Norway. The next year found him similarly engaged on the coast of Greenland; while in 1857 he investigated the marine fauna of Vigo, on the north coast of Spain. The knowledge so obtained afterwards proved of great service to him; the collections of radiates, echinoderms, and mollusks made by him in these voyages were subsequently divided between the British Museum and the university of Cambridge.
In 1855 Barrett was appointed curator of the Woodwardian museum at Cambridge (in succession to m'Coy); here, in addition to developing and arranging the fine series of lias saurians collected by Hawkins, the chalk fossils of Dr. Young, and the local collections, he made his name known to geologists by discovering in 1858 the bones of birds in the phosphate bed of the upper greensand, near Cambridge, together with remains of large pterodactyles, which were afterwards described by Professor Owen. In the same year as that in which he received his Cambridge appointment he was elected a fellow of the Geological Society of London, being then only eighteen—an unprecedented circumstance. At Cambridge he was highly esteemed, especially by Professor Sedgwick, whose place as a lecturer on geology he frequently took. One excellent piece of work executed by Barrett during his Cambridge residence was a geological map of Cambridgeshire, which passed through several editions. But a great advancement was awaiting our still youthful geologist. In 1859 he received the appointment of director of the geological survey of Jamaica, a post worth 700l. per annum, and he at once set out for the colony, accompanied by his newly-married wife.
Arrived in Jamaica, Barrett set to work upon the study and mapping of its rocks with
