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x literary labour. They had found quite enough to do in endeavouring to live. Men matured in years, or ripening into manhood, have no adequate notion of the blank barrenness in every form of social life which, at the time of Queen Anne, and of the First and Second Georges, overspread the land of Eire. With the learned Franciscans of Donegal, a few of the spiritual sons of St. Dominick, and a wandering bard or two of a joyless time, the genius of literature and learning seems to have fled from the face of Catholic Ireland, and sought an asylum in the college of St. Anthony of Padua, at Louvain; in the colleges for the exiled Irish founded at Paris, Lisbon, Salamanca, Valladolid, St. Isidore's, or the College de Prop, fide, at Rome. It has happened, then, that very little regarding the author of these Sermons has been from native sources transmitted to the present generation of Irishmen. A few faint rays alone, reflected from the once living form, have passed through the storm-clouds of that eventful period, and just barely touch the horizon of the present. They convey at best but a dim and an imperfect outline of the original figure, whose portrait in the fullest form it is the wish of the present writer to put before those who read this volume.

In the hands, however, of any person acquainted with the political and social history of this country, during the past three centuries, authentic materials for a Memoir have been in sufficient amount, furnished not alone by the voice of historic tradition, but by the volume of Sermons published during his own lifetime by the author; and lasltylastly [sic], by "Extracts from the Consistorial Acts taken