| Description | Mainly meditations and soliloquies many of them inordinately long, e.g., the first has vv.6-120 (pp.1-8); another (pp.18-53) has no less than 580 verses all counted, with a slip of 100 on p.50 (513 is followed by 414), and 479 (-579) is incorrectly followed by 500 (-580) on p.53; his "Description of Hipocrites” (54-70) occupies 252 verses, with a curious transition in numbering at p.66; “What prayer is", 31vv (70-71), and a “Christmas Caroll” of 43 vv (72-75). By far the most interesting are what he calls soliloquies “upon my former falls” [not falls from grace, but from his horse, into ditches and quicksands, &c.] which (if literally true) show the writer to be equally at home in Wales and Ireland, give us a good deal of local colour, and prove him once to have been a soldier and duellist, and a pretty deep drinker - all which supply a wonderful change from the piety and heavy moralising of the meditations. It is well to note that the 580 vv. on pp.18-53 were put together at Trim in Ireland; and that the lightest touches in the book are on pp.13-14, being "An Anagram ... made upon the Swearing and Admittance of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ireland … Sir Charles Meredith", and an anagram, with verses to Francis Godolphin, another prominent official ("God helps in france"). With our present knowledge, it is quite hopeless to be sure of the name of the author. Members of the Bulkeley family had held high clerical office in Ireland - Lancelot Bulkeley, half-brother to the third Sir Richard, was Archbishop of Dublin, and his son William archdeacon of Dublin, but neither of these sits in very well with the outlook and context of his compilation of verse. On p.15 the writer says he had boon spared for sixty years, a statement of little help standing as it does unrelated to other facts |