Animadversions on the proposal for sending back the nobility and gentry of Ireland - London: 1690. 4to. pp. 39. Repair to margin of final leaf, with minute loss of text, titlepage dusted,...

Animadversions on the proposal for sending back the nobility and gentry of Ireland - London: 1690. 4to. pp. 39. Repair to margin of final leaf, with minute loss of text, titlepage dusted, otherwise a good copy in modern quarter calf. Wing A 3199A. Scarce. The proposal ventilated by Sir Richard Buckley was hotly condemned by this anonymous critic describing how “Walking the other day in the Court of Requests (near to the Areopgus of London, where most men spend their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing), I encountered a pamphlet, dress’d up in the new mode of A letter to a gentleman” and began to think with myself, what pity it is that .... so much paper should be wasted in such idle and unprofitable trifles.” Of the author he writes “without question the man is in a dream. He talks like a hen-wife of hens and geese giving them eggs (as if he had lately come from surveying Leaden-Hall, or the Stocks-Market) but will not know, nor under-stand, that in such parts of Ulster, where the enemy have ravaged, and even in many of those where our Forces are quarter’d, there is not left a hen to cackle, or a cow to give them milk.” Searching for a suitable simile with which to define the total impracticality of the notion he recalls “Sir Silvester Brown who propos’d to the Council in Ireland to settle Stages and a Post-Road between Dublin and Holyhead under the Sea” - and all this three centuries before the opening of the Channel Tunnel. Sweeney 728.

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