417), was “an English Heretick, an apostate Carmelite, and a married priest. This poor wretch, except his calumnies against men and his blasphemies against God and his saints, hath nothing in him worthy to be taken notice of”. Condemned by his brother Protestants, Vossius, Wharton, etc., for his acrimony and falsehood, it is little wonder the Catholics, on the death of Edward VI., chased him from Kilkenny. Had his “King Johan: a play, in two parts”, published by the Camden Society in 1838, been known in his lifetime, in which drama he apotheosises that merciless tyrant, alike despicable, cruel, and infamous, the murderer of his own nephew, as a great reformer, “the model of every virtue, human and divine”, it would have completed his infamy and disgrace. No earthly fears should have prevailed on an orthodox bishop to pretend to consecrate a man whose life was such a disgrace to religion. I do not lay much stress on the formal words of the Bull appointing Myler Magrath to these sees, 12th October, 1565, vacant _per obitum Eugenii Magnissae_: it simply shows he was not deposed, and it may have been with him as with his successor, that hopes were entertained for some years that he would abandon his state conformity, which I trust was the case. The astute and wily ministers of Elizabeth at this early date did not compel apostacy, nor seek for purity of morals; though apostates themselves, all they required was outward conformity, that the elect should take investiture from the crown. They bided their time. It is questionable but that Sir James Ware knew Bishop Dougan had been Bishop of Soder and Man, for in one of his MSS. in Trinity College Library, cited by Reeves, p. 177, he writes of John Duncan, Archdeacon of Down, in 1373, “Factus Episcopus Sodorensis sive Insular. Manniar, 1374”; the different spelling of the name, and the great age Dr. Dougan must have attained before his elevation to Down in 1394 (living till 1412), may have induced him to doubt the identity. I am delighted to learn that we are to have these valuable papers with others on the succession of the Irish sees, published in a separate volume; and were I permitted to offer a suggestion, I would recommend that the succession should be brought down to the period of the Confederation of Kilkenny, when all the sees, with the exception of Derry and Dromore, were, I think, full. Enriched with a few biographical notes, such a work would be a valuable accession to Irish ecclesiastical history, and would, besides, utterly shatter the vain and fanciful theories of Mant, Palmer, etc., as to apostolical succession through the puritanical Adam Loftus, the apostate rector of Outwell, in Norfolk, to which he had been appointed in 1556—(Cotton’s _Fasti_, v. p. 197).