THE
WORTHIES OF IRELAND
Biographia Hibernica
BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY
OF THE
WORTHIES OF IRELAND,
FROM THE
EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE PRESENT TIME.
WRITTEN AND COMPILED
BY RICHARD RYAN.

“On Lough Neagh’s banks as the fisherman strays, “When the clear cold eve is declining, “He sees the round towers of other days “In the wave beneath him shining: “Thus shall memory often, in dreams sublime, “Catch a glimpse of the days that are over; “Thus, sighing, look through the waves time, “For the long faded glories they cover.”

—MOORE’S IRISH MELODIES.

- IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II:
LONDON:
JOHN WARREN, OLD BOND STREET;
M. N. MAHON; R. MILLIKEN; AND HODGES & M‘ARTHUR,
DUBLIN.
MDCCCIXI [1821; being Vol. II]

[Copy text held in NY Public Library]

Printed by J. Brettell,
Rupert Street, Haymarket, London.

Editorial note: Ryan's habitual vagaries of spelling include words like “croud” (crowd), “befal” and “recal” (with single 'l'), and some very peculiar variations on the word “magnanimity” in different places. Many of these have been noted using the editorial [sic] and others silently emended. There are also recurrent irregularities in the six of font used for extended passages of narrative and speech which seem to be inserted as a block in the text at some point. Two such in Vol. II are Thomas Sheridan’s contest with the Smock Alley rioters (pp.508-14) and a report on R. B. Sheridan’s impeachment of Hastings speech (pp.529-35). The use of inverted commas and italics, or simply capital initials, for book-titles is likewise erratic throughout the book. These have been retained since the task of altering them involves too many variations from the printed page.

On the other hand, the m-dash associated with recurrent punctuation marks such as <:— > before speeches have been dropped in places where they seem extraneous to the sense though retained on others where they seem to denote oratical flights especially in the course of the parliamentary speech which are so common in this book as a whole. The practice of marking page-turns with bow brackets signifying the number of the new page has been adopted here as best reflecting the format of the text itself. (Elsewhere in RICORSO the use of square brackets to mark end-of-page has already been adopted as standard and the use of the bow-bracket for top-of-page will now become standard too.) The regular n-dash hypens used to mark compound nouns have been of course retained but those employed to denote a work broken at the margin have been removed, as have those which mark a work broken at turn-of-page - in which case the format <con{435}tinued> is used, thus killing the hyphen at end-of-page. (The hyphen is of course retained when it belongs to a compound word such as bed-chamber or off-spring and in many instances it has taken spell-check to detect errors of this kind.)

Ryan’s preference for lengthy paragraphs devoted to any single episode in a given career rather than the reader’s convenience or the appearance of the page has been retained - though passages copied to the A-Z Dataset in RICORSO occasionally involve breaks merely for reader-convenience. This, taken with the constant use of sem-colons, are entirely typical of style of writing in Biog. Hib. and merits preservation for that reason alone. Though spirited and eloquent in many places, Ryan is writing in the shadow of the Irish oratical tradition which he so much admires in Grattan, Curran and R. B. Sheridan, and thus his style tends towards inflation out side of the remarkable speeches which he quotes at such length. In addition to the spirit of homage invoked by this treatment, there is a sense of vain imitation which marks Ryan off from his models - if only because he seems to be writing in the manner of a foregone age. There are also questions of phraseology and spelling, as mentioned earlier, which suggests that he is not the education equal of his subjects and his resort to latin tags and epithets seems more like journalistic rote than classical education.