Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 / A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.

Your correspondent T. K. seems to think that Scotchmen, and Scotch subjects, have an undue prominence in N. & Q.: let me therefore introduce to your readers a neglected Irishman , in the person of Peter Brett, the parish clerk and schoolmaster of Castle-Knock. This worthy seems to have been a great author, and the literary oracle of the district over which he presided, and exercised the above-named important functions. His magnum opus appears to have been his Miscellany ; a farrago of prose and verse, which, to distinguish it from the herd of books bearing that title, is yclept, par excellence , Brett's Miscellany . When Mr. Brett commenced to enlighten the world, and when his candle was snuffed out, I know not. My volume of the above work purports to be the fifth:
Containing above a hundred useful and entertaining Particulars, Divine, Moral, and Historical; chiefly designed for the Improvement of Youth, and those who have not the Opportunity of reading large Volumes. Interspersed with several Entertaining Things never before printed. Dublin, 1762.
The parish clerk's bill of fares is of the most seductive kind. Under all the above heads he has something spicy to say, either in prose or verse; but the marrow of the book lies in the Preface. To say that a man, holding the important offices of parish clerk and schoolmaster, could be charged with conceit, would be somewhat rash; if, therefore, in remarking upon the rare instance of a parish clerk becoming an author, he lets out that whatever cavillers may say about his performance, they must admit his extensive reading, and the great labour and application the concoction of these books has cost him, he is but indulging in a feeling natural to a man of genius, and a pardonable ebullition of the amour propre . Mr. Brett seems to have been twitted with the charge of taking up authorship as a commercial spec; he sullenly admits that his book-making leaves him something, but nothing like a recompense, and draws an invidious comparison between one Counsellor Harris and himself; the