[113] Ten years later Dublin sent out a cargo of provisions valued at £937 13s. to New England, and the benevolence was gratefully and gracefully commemorated in 1880 by Captain Potter, of the Constellation, when he brought over America’s consignment to our famishing agriculturists, and received the honorary freedom of our city. It may be noted, too, that ten years before the contribution to London, Dublin sent a relief amounting to £1,000 to the Waldenses, when suffering from the persecution of the Duke of Savoy. The last-named collection was made by a Cromwellian Fellow of Trinity College, the Rev. Samuel Mather, an excellent man, who on the Restoration was thrown into a Dublin prison, probably the “Black Dog,” for declining to sign the Act of Uniformity. The New England collection was made by his brother, the Rev. Nathaniel Mather, Minister of the New-row Meeting-house. The collection for London was made by the Duke of Ormond.
[114] This encouragement of the linen trade here proved a hypocrisy and imposture. The linen trade was never an equivalent for the wool trade.
[115] Excepting, perhaps, Poyning’s Act, and the Act of Union, this was the most disgraceful Act ever passed by an Irish Parliament.
[116] See page [lxx], note, and [35].
[117] See page [lxx], note, and [43].
[118] It was on the Army Augmentation Bill that Hutchinson made one of his early “strides in apostasy.” It was on this occasion also that Ireland was for the first time called upon to contribute to England’s war expenses. She passed a vote of credit for £200,000. See pages [44], [46].
[119] The condition of the people would thus seem to have declined from what it was a century before. In 1672, Petty stated in his “Political Anatomy,” that the drink of the Irish people was milk, and in winter small beer or water; and that their food was bread made into cakes, with eggs and rancid butter, and with muscles, cockles, and oysters, on the sea-shore parts.
[120] There are also several inaccuracies in the printed edition, which are reproduced as they stand. E.g., in page 81 “between £12,000 and £13,000” is set down as an increase on £1,100,000; and Petty’s “Survey” is throughout put for his Political Anatomy. In the note to page 127 the literal misprints in the Greek quotation are corrected. The line is given “as Homer quoted by Longinus,” and as if it were a Homeric line, but it is not a hexameter at all. The quotation joins the beginning of one line to a portion of another, and it is needless to say that the break was duly notified by Longinus, though apparently it was not perceived by the Provost.
The passage occurs in the 17th book of the Odyssey, V.V. 323-3:—
“Ἡμισυ γαρ τ᾽ ᾽αρετῆς ἀποαίνυται ἐυρυόπα Ζευς
᾽Ανε᾽ρος, ἐῦτ᾽ αν μιν κατα δουλιον ἧμαρ ἔλησιν.”