Author: BROWNE (Peter), Lord Bishop of Cork and Rosse:
Title: A Discourse of Drinking Healths. Wherein The great Evil of this Prevailing Custom is shewn; And the Obligation which lieth upon all good Christians to Suppress and Discountenance it to the utmost of their Power.
Description: London: Printed for Henry Clements, at the Half-Moon in St. Paul's Church -Yard. MDCCXVI. 1716. FIRST LONDON EDITION. Small 8vo, 167 x 98 mms., pp. viii, 9 - 217 [2178 - 223 Contents and adverts, 224 blank], recentlky rebound in half chocolate calf, marbled boards, dark olive morocco labels, gilt rules, gilt ornaments on spine, with date in gilt at base of spine. A very good copy, with the bookplate of Peter Stewart Young, Tillingham on the front paste-down end-.paper ,and inscribed on the rect of the secndleaf, "The Dean of Ross/to/ The Dean of Devon/ 28 Feb. '28". Peter Browne (d. 1735) came from a well-established Irish family and progressed quickly to high offices in the Church. He established a reputation for intelligence in discourse and pithiness in argument, with the publication of a riposte, A Letter in Answer to a Book Entitled Christianity not Mysterious by John Toland. The present work is a further develop of arguments by Browne in his A Discourse on Drinking, in Rembmerance of the Dead, attracted a reply from "A Country -Curate," A Brief Examination of the Bishop of Cork's Discourse, of Drinking to the Memory of the Dead (Dublin, 1714). Both discourses attracted some attention, but I am partial to a comment made in 1841, in T. Croften Croker's volume, The Historical Songs of Ireland about Brown's 1714 volume, that, "His notion was that drinking to the dead was tantamount to praying for them, and not, as is truly the case, in approbation of certain conduct or principles. Neither whigs nor tories have been less copious in their libations in consequence; and the only effect Dr. Brown's books appear to have had, was the production of an addenda to the obnoxious toast, 'and a fig for the Bishop of Cork.'"

Keywords: booze religion prose


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