I presume that there 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.