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 into Barret's opinions. The accused was therefore summoned to Lambeth, and required to answer certain questions sent down from Cambridge. At a second meeting he was confronted with a deputation headed by Whitaker, and at last consented to make another recantation. This seems to have been done after many delays. In March 1597 the archbishop warned the authorities that Barret was contemplating flight; but he had set out before the letter reached them. Whilst on the continent he embraced the Roman catholic faith, and eventually returned to England, where he lived as a layman till his death. The fruit of this controversy is seen in the so-called Lambeth Articles. Barret is by some identified with the publisher, who prefixed a letter to his own edition of Robert Southwell's works, entitled ‘St. Peter's Complainte, Mary Magdal Teares, with other works of the author, R. S.,’ London, 1620 and 1630.



BARRETT, EATON STANNARD (1786–1820), author of a poem on ‘Woman’ and of several clever political satires, was a native of Cork, where he was born in 1786. Very little is recorded of his life, but he attended for some time a private school at Wandsworth Common, where he wrote a play with prologue and epilogue, which was acted before the master and his family with considerable success. Although he entered the Middle Temple, London, he was apparently never called to the bar. In private his attractive manners and the worth of his disposition secured him many friends. He died in Glamorganshire of a rapid decline on 20 March 1820.

In 1810 Barrett published ‘Woman and other Poems,’ of which a third edition appeared in 1819, a new edition in 1822, and another in 1841. The poem is an enthusiastic eulogy on the virtues and graces of woman. The verse is influent and rhythmical, but in the artificial manner of Pope, and oratorical rather than poetic. Besides a mock romance, ‘The Heroine,’ which reached a third edition, Barrett wrote a large number of political satires, which, judging from the number of editions they passed through, achieved a great temporary success. The best known of these is ‘All the Talents, a Satirical Poem in Three Dialogues,’ written under the pseudonym of Polypus, in ridicule of the whig administration of the day. Among others of which he is known to be the author are ‘The Comet, a Satire,’ 2nd edition, 1808; ‘Talents run Mad, or Eighteen Hundred and Sixteen, a Satirical Poem by E. S. B.,’ 1816; ‘The Rising Sun, a Serio-comic Romance, by Cervantes Hogg, F.S.M.,’ 1807, 5th edition, 1809; and ‘The Setting Sun, or the Devil among the Placemen,’ by the same, 1809. He also wrote a comedy, ‘My Wife, What Wife?’ and a writer in ‘Notes and Queries’ supposes that he was also the author of ‘Tarantula, a Dance of Fools,’ 1809.



BARRETT, ELIZABETH. [See ]

BARRETT, GEORGE (1752–1821), actuary, was the son of a farmer of Wheeler Street, a small hamlet in Surrey. At an early age, although engaged in daily labour, he made, unaided, considerable progress in mathematics, taking special interest in the class of problems connected with the duration of human life. He afterwards, during a period of twenty-five years (1786–1811), laboured assiduously at his great series of life assurance and annuity tables, working all the while, first as a schoolmaster, afterwards as a land steward, for the maintenance of younger relatives, to whose support he devoted a great part of his earnings. In 1813 he became actuary to the Hope Life Office, but retained that appointment for little more than two years. In the worldly sense his life was all failure. At the age of sixty-four he retired, broken in health and worn in spirit, to pass his remaining days with his sisters, at whose house in Godalming he died in 1821.

His comprehensive series of life tables, and the ingenious and fertile method, known as the columnar method, which he had devised for their construction, won the ardent approval of Francis Baily, who made earnest but vain efforts to get them published by subscription, and afterwards (in 1812) read a paper upon them before the Royal Society; but that body, for reasons unexplained, refused to order the memoir to be printed. It was then published as an appendix to the edition of 1813 of Baily's work on ‘Annuities.’ There has been some controversy as to the originality of Barrett's method. His claims have been ably vindicated by De Morgan (Assurance Magazine, iv. 185, xii.