Footnotes:
[1] “Bryan O’Brien, of the county of Kerry, son of Teige, born 1740, married, 17th November 1797, Ellen, daughter of Justin MacCarthy (by Joanna Conway, his wife); and had: I. Richard, who died unmar. in Jan. 1861; II. Lucien, who also died unmar. in America, in Mar. 1865; III. Turlogh Henry, author of The Round Towers of Ireland, who died unmar. 1835” (O’Hart’s Irish Pedigrees, p. 168). At pp. 39, 40, post, O’Brien alludes to his maternal grandfather as “the last of the MacCarthy Mores.”
[2] At pp. 480, 481, post: thus, by the way, refuting a statement (in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1835) which has been adopted in the Dictionary of National Biography, that he was utterly ignorant of Celtic.
[3] It is not to be supposed that a University Professor of Greek would have had any difficulty in explaining to the most ordinary intelligence an idiom so frequently occurring in the New Testament as εἰς τὰ ἴδια, which we meet with, not only in the passage referred to (John i. 11), but at xvi. 32 and xix. 37 of the same Gospel, and at xxi. 6 of the Acts of the Apostles. Nor is it likely that the exegetic difficulty connected with τὰ ἴδια would have occurred to a boy of twelve. Further, Mr. Boyton did not resign his connection with the University until 1833, whereas, in the passage above cited, O’Brien evidently refers to some time about 1820.
[4] It is not even clear that he is identical with the “Henry O’Brien” mentioned in the Catalogue of the Graduates of the University of Dublin from 1691 to 1868, now in the British Museum. The entry is as follows:—“Henry O’Brien, B.A. (ad eundem, Cantab.), 1835.”
[5] This must have been the English Master of the Rolls, who at that time was the Right Hon. Sir John Leach, a judge remarkable for the celerity of his decisions, in marked contrast to those of his contemporary, Lord Eldon, of whom it used to be said that he heard cases without determining them, whereas Sir John Leach determined cases without hearing them.
[6] Edinburgh Review, vol. lix. pp. 148, 149.
[7] Mr. Marcus Keane, author of The Temples and Round Towers of Ancient Ireland, states in his Preface to that work that he spent three years, during which he had to travel more than five thousand miles, in the performance of a task not much more exacting.
[8] From “To the Public,” a narrative prefixed to his translation of Villanueva’s “Ibernia Phœnicia,” which preceded The Round Towers.
[9] Ibid. p. xxxii. “’Ερεμω” may, however, be an error of the printer, and the fact that it was subsequently corrected lends colour to this view.