re is no gentleman in Europe that has not heard of
the house of Barry of Barryogue, of the kingdom of Ireland, than which a
more famous name is not to be found in Gwillim or D'Hozier; and though,
as a man of the world, I have learned to despise heartily the claims
of some PRETENDERS to high birth who have no more genealogy than the
lacquey who cleans my boots, and though I laugh to utter scorn the
boasting of many of my countrymen, who are all for descending from kings
of Ireland, and talk of a domain no bigger than would feed a pig as if
it were a principality; yet truth compels me to assert that my family
was the noblest of the island, and, perhaps, of the universal world;
while their possessions, now insignificant and torn from us by war, by
treachery, by the loss of time, by ancestral extravagance, by adhesion
to the old faith and monarch, were formerly prodigious, and embraced
many counties, at a time when Ireland was vastly more prosperous than
now. I would assume the Irish crown over my coat-of-arms, but that there
are so many silly pretenders to that distinction who bear it and render
it common.

Who knows, but for the fault of a woman, I might have been wearing
it now? You start with incredulity. I say, why not? Had there been a
gallant chief to lead my countrymen, instead or puling knaves who bent
the knee to King Richard II., they might have been freemen; had there
been a resolute leader to meet the murderous ruffian Oliver Cromwell, we
should have shaken off the English for ever. But there was no Barry in
the field against the usurper; on the contrary, my ancestor, Simon de
Bary, came over with the first-named monarch, and married the daughter
of the then King of Munster, whose sons in battle he pitilessly slew.

In Oliver's time it was too late for a chief of the name of Barry
to lift up his war-cry against that of the murderous brewer. We were
princes of the land no longer; our unhappy race had lost its possessions
a century previously, and by the most shameful treason. This I know to
be the fact, for my mother has often told me the story, and besides had
worked it in a worsted pedigree which hung up in the yellow saloon at
Barryville where we lived.

That very estate which the Lyndons now possess in Ireland was once the
property of my race. Rory Barry of Barryogue owned it in Elizabeth's
time, and half Munster beside. The Barry was always in feud with the
O'Mahonys in those times; and, as it happened, a