‘Though I don’t wish to hurry you, yet I hope your copy will come soon; I accept your terms, or rather I insist upon them, but do not content yourself with what you may have written in the margin, in which, upon this occasion, I am sorry to believe you must be straitened for want of room; however, you can stick papers between the leaves, and in charity spare not the rod, as it may save the child. I have on all hands got more praise than I well know what to do with, and something else may now be more profitable to me. ‘In what you say of yourself I feel for the country—the loss is theirs, not yours. God Almighty has so ordered matters in this world that it is praiseworthy and honourable when genius and abilities will struggle to exert themselves for the service of others; it was for this end they were given, and with the consciousness of these honest and dutiful endeavours such men must be contented, and, indeed, ought to be happy, as no more can depend upon themselves. Others are to be accountable, and to receive glory or infamy for what is done on their part in the assistance or the obstruction they may have flung in the way. Farewell! ‘Yours most affectionately, ‘J. BARRY.’ ‘Adelphi: July 1783. ‘Dear Sir,—I am delighted with your account of Ireland, ’tis wise, candid, bold, exceedingly humane, and just what the nature of the case required. I have long been sick at heart of the timid, trimming, mistakingly prudent, and palliating conduct of those writers who have been hitherto quacking and dabbling with the sores and miseries of that country, and was without the least hope of ever seeing this matter undertaken by any man of such sufficient courage, philanthropy, or charity (which are indeed but different points of view of the same virtue), as might obtain for us a fair, open and entire exposition of this unexampled and very melancholy case. Judge, then, what a pleasure I am receiving in the perusal of your book. You have, I find, probed the evil to the bottom, and left me without a wish. The men of Ireland are surely much indebted to you, and will, I trust, one day acknowledge it, but for the present you must have patience and ought to bear with them, as the illiberality or meanness you may justly complain of may fairly be ascribed to an unhappy combination of circumstances, owing principally to the tyrannical monopolising disposition and rascally interference of your own forefathers, who had with the most abominable and diabolical policy employed their whole skill and power utterly to erase from the minds of Irishmen all those noble and generous feelings which were incompatible with a servile and enslaved condition, and which ultimately estranged them from the exercise of even the ordinary vulgar virtues.